


A Ghost Between Us

by Gunshy Fiction (Defiler_Wyrm)



Series: The Ghosts Between Us [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Anal Sex, Angst, Blasphemy, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Fingerfucking, First Time, Frottage, Intercrural Sex, Light BDSM, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Made For Each Other, Mildly Dubious Consent, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Prayer, Rough Sex, Samifer Week 2012, Time Travel, Wing Kink, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:46:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Gunshy%20Fiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“No tricks,” he murmurs. “I don’t need to torture you to get what I want from you, Sam; you’ll give it willingly. Not tonight. But you will. And between here and there and afterward I will never hurt you in any way you don’t want me to.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Lucifer haunts Sam’s dreams. They circle each other, finding that temptation — like so many other things — is a two-way street, and each of them is drawn to the other more than he might like to admit. Even with their goals at odds they’re hurtling towards something terrifying and new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sam has a stalker, full of honeyed words and soft assurances he doesn’t want to believe. Sam’s POV.
> 
>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Tool: [Parabol](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMLHUctQkq0); Lucifer » Lacuna Coil: [Un Fantasma tra Noi](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eI8GDh58vQ)

“ _Don’t touch me_.” It comes out in one breath as if it were a single word, a strangled yelp to match the way his head snaps aside and his shoulders follow. His every muscle seizes as if the brush of knuckles against his cheek had been a bullet ripping through his chest instead.

“Sam.” The voice is all patient chiding, and that only makes it worse. So does the expression that meets him as he wheels, backpedaling: something between confusion and the sort of pained reproach that comes with rejection. It curdles his stomach just as surely as it sends tongues of ice slithering up his spine.

“No,” he cuts back. “Leave me alone, I told you already—”

The Devil dismisses his interruption with a swish of a hand. “That you won’t say Yes, so you said.”

Sam’s throat tightens as he swallows. With some effort he pulls himself up to his full height and gives a jerky nod that isn’t nearly as confident as he’d been going for. “Right. Not happening. So you might as well go.”

Lucifer’s lips (not his, Sam reminds himself, but those of some poor bastard named Nick who’s lucky if his consciousness has burned away by now) curl in a smile that’s indulgent, even fond. It makes him shiver again. God, the Devil’s smirking at him  _affectionately_  and he just wants to double over and retch.

“I like that conviction, Sam,” he damn near croons with his voice now aglow with pride. The archangel keeps his fingers laced together, resting against his waist. “You’re wrong of course but that fire in your belly, that’s a good thing. On the other hand…you don’t need to be afraid of me.”

The hunter tracks the first step taken to the side, and the second that comes towards him at an angle, a slow spiral approach not unlike one might take towards a startled animal. It takes Sam a moment (and by then he’s already sidling the other way) that just as Lucifer had the first night he revealed himself, he’s  _allowing_ Sam that exit, the chance to move away, rather than crowding him into a corner.

That’s what stops him short, actually. The Devil stops too.

“Yeah sorry if I don’t believe you,” Sam huffs. Both hands spasm into fists at his sides. There are no weapons here in the bedroom he’s dreaming — not that anything he would have on hand would do anything but piss Satan off anyway. Still, his fingers itch to clench around the familiar cool weight of bone or steel, if only for the illusion of being able to fight back.

And the damned angel’s brow actually furrows as if he’s honestly confused. He even tilts his head in the same birdlike gesture Sam’s come to associate with Castiel. “Why would I want to hurt you?”

“You’re the  _Devil_ ,” Sam insists. His own brows rise. Obvious reasoning.

“Your name, not mine,” he corrects lightly, wagging a finger. “Well, title, really, but you get the idea. I’m not here to slander or accuse you, Sam.” (The taller man blinks while the gears turn in his head until  _click_  — Greek. Ah.) “Try again. Why would I want to hurt you?”

Lucifer’s advancing again. Sam startles back fast enough to trip over the corner of the bed.  His mind flashes back to his father’s storage in New York. Shattered bones. Blood pouring from his brother’s mouth. The impossible crush of a body screaming for air with no lungs to draw it in. “To force consent out of me. What Zachariah’s done….”

“Ohh, Zachariah,” the archangel drawls. He lets his head loll back to stare at the ceiling dramatically, then affects a pinched look of distaste. “You know I don’t think he really gets the whole  _consent_  thing. It’s an unfortunate side effect of not having free will in the first place.”

For the second time Sam stops short. In the span his mind spends racing over the implications Lucifer closes the gap between them, hovering just beyond arm’s reach. (Well. Maybe within Sam’s reach. His arms are pretty long.)

The Devil’s voice is a thrumming in his chest, a drone of white noise in his head, cold silk against his skin. Soothing. Inexorable. The blue eyes gazing up at him are hypnotic as a snake’s. The sense of calm that washes over him now the Devil’s so near can’t be anything but a trick. Surely there’s no other explanation for why his body orients itself to the blond’s like the snap of magnets.

“No tricks,” he murmurs. “I don’t need to torture you to get what I want from you, Sam; you’ll give it willingly. Not tonight. But you will. And between here and there and afterward I will never hurt you in any way you don’t want me to.”

There’s something lurking in the rumble of those words and the lupine curl of his lips that snaps Sam out of his reverie with another hard clench in his gut. “I’m not giving you a damn thing but your walking papers.  _Get. Out. Of my head_.”

Lucifer stares for a long moment, shrugs, and stares some more, until Sam seizes fistfuls of his own hair and squeezes his eyes shut as he bellows, “ _OUT!_ ” —but he’s already alone.

He wakes up cold and gasping, and never does manage to get back to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer makes an unexpected offer; Sam is dubious. Lucifer’s POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _It’s so damned unfair to have to look at this perfect creature — made just for him in body, mind, and soul — from the outside. He steps into Sam’s reach, closer to that intoxicating warmth, and presses his luck in reaching up to stroke an elbow. His Grace flares. The sharp breath Sam sucks in tells him he wasn’t the only one to feel it. For a moment he’d like to imagine the alignment of their cores will be enough to make Sam close the remaining distance. Alas. The downside of his true vessel sharing his recalcitrant streak is that he’s, well, recalcitrant. Instead of pressing forward as he ought he shoves at Lucifer’s shoulder. Of course this doesn’t force the archangel to move in the least but he pushes himself backwards where he glares, suspicious and spooked._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Disturbed: [Want](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAgboJGglfA); Lucifer » This Will Destroy You: [Little Smoke](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SERfdjtGjJA)

“Stay back.” It comes out between gritted teeth in a snarl that’s only half a breath — the other half of the sharp lungful of air the hunter drew in for it hissing out in a snort even as he growls the words. The terror with which his first two visits had been met is tempered now by something else. Sam’s shoulders are squared off in tension. A muscle jumps under the sharp line of his cheekbone. This aggression is new.

“Sam.” It’s admonition and cajoling all at once. He’s being unreasonable, so Lucifer uses his most reasonable voice.

“No,” he barks. The man’s right hand forms a fist that shakes at his side and Lucifer finds himself distracted by the shift of vein and bone beneath the skin — how bronze turns white when it stretches taut over knuckles. He knows that hand: every calcium strut, every nerve branch, every pop of potassium and sodium sluicing back and forth to make the muscles twitch. He knows the rage burning in the tainted blood that makes it clench in spite of Sam’s fear. He knows the soul that directs it, the same one that tugs at his Grace and has his own ill-fitting hand aching to reach out and touch.

But Sam is speaking, and Lucifer can’t help but give his full attention.

”No, screw you, stay the Hell away from me.” The fist rises to jab a finger at the archangel. An eyelid twitches annoyance when Lucifer’s gaze dips from Sam’s face to that accusing finger and back.

Brows arch high over calm blue eyes and he tips his head to one side. “Tell me where you are, then, so I’ll know where not to go.” The tug at his insides, at his true self, keeps him all too honest, and a playful smirk pulls at his lips to make his teasing clear. Only serious.

Sam doesn’t seem to find it terribly funny even if he does laugh. There’s no mirth in it — just incredulity.

“You think I’m that stupid?” he sneers. The hunter’s face slackens a moment later when the archangel replies, “No,” as if he hadn’t expected it.

(It pains him that his true vessel has so little faith in him. On the other hand there’s something horribly, horribly amusing about that thought.)

“I’d rather you tell me where you are so I’ll know where  _to_  go,” he amends, and Sam’s eye-roll stirs dissonance through his veins. Staying still, staying away is surely going to make him shake apart — he’s so close. Even dreamwalking the proximity to his true vessel has him thrumming against the underside of Nick’s skin. Slow, deliberate steps carry him across the room; he still gives the human an avenue of retreat to let him choose, and tries not to let his disappointment show when Sam chooses, as he has before, to shy away. “Don’t be like that, Sam. I just wanna talk.” A short breath leaves him and he catches himself, muttering: “Maybe a little more than talk.”

Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. Sam’s pulse jumps at his throat; his spine straightens, body tensing again, and there it is, that thread of fear twisting tightly around something he must desperately want to deny. For all he’s relished others’ fear of him it’s different here. Where Sam’s anger and fierce individualism and dwindling faith have been an encouraging beacon of familiarity, his fear — at least when it’s directed at Lucifer — sets a shiver through him, a deep urge to peel it away and coax out the hidden thing that had hazel eyes dilating in  _want_  rather than trepidation.

“Thought you said torture was off the menu.” Pitching his voice low can’t mask its uncertainty. Not from an archangel. (It’s all Lucifer can do to restrain his exasperation to a mere roll of his eyes, and even then it’s a doozy of an eye-roll.) “What else would….”

As Sam trails off little flickers in the setting of his dream betray where his thoughts are straying. A warm body beside him. The scent of linen on flaxen hair. Fine-boned fingers brushing his nape. His attention fixes on the edge of the bed. The archangel takes it as submission, as invitation, and all at once he’s close enough to feel the heat of his true vessel’s body breaking through his own endless cold like the sun whose rays he was denied for so long.

Until Sam set him free and let his wings stretch in the light again. He hasn’t known gratitude like this since time immemorial. What irony, though, some part of him muses, that he — the Morning Star — should be drawn to this human’s base, physical warmth like a moth to flame. It should fill him with revulsion. Instead there’s only want. Only need. The same need has him reaching out as he has before. Sam freezes like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk; the Lightbringer’s hand looms in his peripheral vision and he shuts his eyes tight just before it alights on his skin. Hot and cold. They could both swear the contact ought to send up steam. The human shivers, bites back a sound that could have been either a groan or a scream.

“Nothing you don’t permit.”

“Not her.” And Sam’s spinning on his heel to loom over Lucifer, eyes blazing and desperate, simultaneously shrugging off the hand and seizing a shoulder in his own before he can think about what he’s doing. Appreciable as the young man’s strength may be it isn’t enough to make the blond budge. A spark of something freezing-cold crackles up his arm at the touch as though he’d grabbed a live wire; he jolts but it isn’t enough to deter his outrage. “Don’t you  _dare_  use her against me you son of a bitch. Never her.”

A lesser being would have betrayed its thoughts by glancing in wonder at the broad stretch of fingers digging into his arm. An archangel is made of sterner stuff — he holds back his glee to focus on what Sam has demanded of him. Jessica had been a convenient form to take while insinuating himself into Sam’s dreams. Now, he supposes, he has no need of the charade, and if making a show of abandoning it will bring Sam a step closer to trusting him then so much the better. So Lucifer strokes a fingertip across the hollow beneath his lips before nodding, grave as anything, and allows his human to believe he’s won some sort of battle. “As you wish. Just you and me, Sam,  _tête-à-tête_.”

It’s so damned unfair to have to look at this perfect creature — made just for him in body, mind, and soul — from the outside. He steps into Sam’s reach, closer to that intoxicating warmth, and presses his luck in reaching up to stroke an elbow. His Grace flares. The sharp breath Sam sucks in tells him he wasn’t the only one to feel it. For a moment he’d like to imagine the alignment of their cores will be enough to make Sam close the remaining distance. Alas. The downside of his true vessel sharing his recalcitrant streak is that he’s, well, recalcitrant. Instead of pressing forward as he ought he shoves at Lucifer’s shoulder. Of course this doesn’t force the archangel to move in the least but he pushes himself backwards where he glares, suspicious and spooked.

“What’s it gonna take to get through to you? We have nothing to talk about. I’m never saying yes and we are going to  _end you_.” Sam chances a glance around the room. There’s a tatty mattress and an archangel between himself and the door; the latter follows his gaze and thought process alike. Does that door even open? Dreams are funny that way. On pure reflex Lucifer reaches out with an unseen tendril of Grace — the trailing end of a wing — as if he can’t stand to have Sam’s attention elsewhere. The noise it elicits (another sharp inhale but this time it shivers) makes all the night’s protests moot. 

Lucifer’s dubious look is half grimace, half smirk. “That’s pretty big talk for someone with exactly no one in his corner except the guy he’s swearing to kill.” He spreads his hands to either side. Damned if the resulting bitchface isn’t completely endearing.

“Yeah right. You’re not in anyone’s corner but your own. If you were in mine you’d— you wouldn’t be trying to  _end the goddamn world_.”

As much as the human might think the Morning Star’s expression — tightened jaw, lips pressed together, arms crossing over his chest as he glances away — is an act, it’s not. “I didn’t write the script, Sam, but we both have our parts to play. That isn’t what I’m talking about though.”

“Then what  _are_  you talking about,” Sam sneers.

“Being in your corner.” Lucifer raises an eyebrow at him and takes an unhurried step forward, lightly stroking the stubble on his chin. The hunter stands his ground — not that there’s much of anywhere for him to go now. He had room to manoeuvre, and chose a wall. Fascinating.  “I told you,  _I_  want you alive and well. I’m kind of counting on it. Heaven…mm, not so much. Matter of fact, I’m willing to bet some of those stuffed shirts would go to alarming lengths to take you out of the picture.”

The bob of an Adam’s apple and the stutter of nervous breath confirm it. The room flickers again, just a heartbeat’s worth of suffocation and thick copper heat on a concrete floor.

“Easy,” Lucifer whispers. He’s itching to touch again. Such an uncomfortable thing. “I could keep you safe from them, if you’d let me watch over you. Them and anything else that might come after you. And don’t—” (he taps a forestalling finger against Sam’s chest and it’s not enough, not nearly enough) “—tell me they won’t find you, because they have before and will again. Let me help you, Sam.”

(By now Winchester’s closed his eyes, brow furrowed, to escape the intensity of the unwavering blue gaze fixed on him. Even then he can feel it burning into him. God, why is he so short of breath?)

“I don’t. Want. Your help,” Sam grates. When he opens his eyes they seek out the ceiling.

Ah, but there’s another angle to everything. In a fit of optimism Lucifer gives this some consideration. “But you do want something. My offer will always be open to you: anything you want that’s within my power to give.”

Much to his dismay, what Sam chokes out is, “I want you to  _leave_ ,” and he sincerely hopes this isn’t going to become a Thing between the two of them. Lucifer’s been locked up for a long damn time. By his reckoning no one can begrudge him a pout, and that’s exactly what he’s having. When it fails to dissuade Sam from that demand, he sighs (extra petulance; he reckons he’s entitled to that, too) and swipes gentle fingertips across his true vessel’s forehead, chasing when the human tries to flinch away. A simple trick that scarcely flexes his Grace sends Sam tumbling into the deepest, dreamless stage of sleep, and sends himself back to where he’d been before.

.

There’s an out-of-season monsoon starting up in Bangladesh the following day. Strange lights coruscate within the steel curtain of the sky as the rain pelts down. It turns to sleet and falls needle-sharp where Lucifer walks the streets of Bhagalpur. In his mind’s eye all this is still primordial wilderness: the deep, dank jungles he walked before the Fall of Man, before the Cage. It was beautiful then. Brutal and pure, like himself. It’ll take centuries to set it right again.

He ought to be three thousand miles west rousing Azi Dahaka. There’ll be time for dragons later.

Today he broods, and the earth wails and groans at the fury of his Grace — but now and then he’ll raise a hand to his shoulder where the memory of warmth is still fresh.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sam loses his temper he expects to be met with Lucifer’s wrath. What he finds instead is surely more damning. Sam’s POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _The rational parts of his brain rattle and rail against this, screaming out the_ wrongness _of everything that’s happening here. Every instinct is snarling back that it’s right — that he’s been waiting a lifetime for this high, that he’s a breath away from filling a hollow that’s ached in him from the start. The war between id and ego has him tugging Lucifer closer and pushing him away all at once._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Nine Inch Nails: [Underneath It All](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtGwZK63Qhg); Lucifer » Metallica: [Loverman](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b_t2D9-X9E)

“NOT OKAY.”

It would have been far more dignified had that been the first thing to leave his mouth when became conscious of the weight on the bed beside him, or more to the point, of  _what_  the weight on the bed beside him was.  Alas, this outburst comes on the heels of a decidedly undignified alarm-squawk and more than a little flailing.

“Sam.” By now nothing about the long-suffered tone poured into that one word surprises him, nor does the admonishing arch of the Devil’s eyebrows; but he’ll be damned if he’s just going to lie there and let Satan act like he’s being unreasonable.

“No, don’t ‘Sam’ me, you get the Hell out of my bed and stay out.” Nevermind that he’s already floundered all the gawky length of his own body off onto his feet beside the mattress. Sam scrubs both hands over his face and glares at the blond man who has obstinately refused to disappear. That ‘I know something you don’t’ grin is really starting to grate on his nerves. “Damn it, why can’t I have normal dreams for a change.”

Lucifer’s shrug is a fluid, elegant thing, devoid of the awkwardness he’s seen in other angels when they struggle through that sort of human gesture. It’s too casual to even come across as smarmy. Sam hates the crap out of that. He wants to see the Devil ill-at-ease in his stolen skin, uncomfortable with having the wrong number of limbs, missing logical room for his wings; wants to see him  _alien_  and  _wrong_ instead of so goddamned graceful that he looks like some sort of noble dressed down in workboots and flannel. The archangel’s comfort is downright offensive.

“We’ve been over this, I think. Normal doesn’t suit you. Maybe that’s why it’s so appealing,” Lucifer allows, lacing his fingers together and turning his palms out, thumbs splayed. “It’s not uncommon to want most keenly what’s out of reach.”

The way he stares at Sam makes the hunter shift uneasily. It’s no leap of logic to catch the subtext there. He himself is still out of reach, thank God, both here in his dreamscape due to the low-slung bed between them, and in the waking world thanks to seals burned into his bones. The former is flimsy, though, and it peels away again as Lucifer paces down to the end of the bed, around the foot, up the side and Sam’s transfixed right up til he can see the whites of the archangel’s eyes. Then, only then, does the “spell” seem to break.

There are seconds left to make a choice. Duck left: onto and across the bed, slow progress but still the quickest way to the door. Sidle right: a freer range of movement that’ll only put him into the corner again. Backpedal: put his back to a wall the way he did before, and  _then_  what? Or stay still: stand his ground and take his chances.

Damn it. He squares his shoulders and meets Satan’s gaze with all the defiance he can muster. It seems ridiculous to say they’re anything other than eyes. Cliché, even, Sam thinks; but it’s not the eyes themselves of course. It’s the  _weight_  of the look that roots him to the spot, the way the air pressure changes the closer they come together as if there’s something pressing at his skin, beaded up and ready to break. It’s a tension, it’s a static charge, it’s bracing like stepping out of a well-heated room into November morning. Gooseflesh rises all over his body, nostrils flare, heat spreads under his skin in stinging contrast to the drop in temperature within Lucifer’s space. There’s a quiet ringing in his ears under the pounding drumbeat of his heart that he can’t be sure isn’t some echo of the archangel’s Voice bleeding through when he speaks in Nick’s rumbling, practical voice.

“It’s hard, I know, trying to let go of what isn’t meant for you and accept what is.”

The bombilating current between them pushes at him from all directions and pulls him in exactly one. Sam rolls his fingers to try to ease their tingling. He’s on the business end of a faint smile that’s too close to  _fond_  again for his liking and more than anything he wants to wipe it off his fucking face by any means possible. Preferably by stabbing. Naturally, he’s  _sans_  knife again tonight. Par for the course.

“Shut. Up,” he growls.  _(Nice one, Sam, that’s sure to work,_  he thinks.) “I don’t have to accept shit from you and I’m not going to either. All this crap you’re doing, all these storms and earthquakes and omens and all the demon bullshit, it’s a waste of your time ‘cause I will  _never_  be yours.”

It might just be Sam’s imagination but he could swear the Devil flinches as if he’d been slapped, and the hunter’s chest puffs with satisfaction. It’s gone as quickly as it came, though, replaced by a head tilt and another version of that horrible look of longing that makes his stomach clench. It’s his turn to wince when Lucifer reaches up for him.  _This is it_ , he thinks deliriously,  _he’s going to kill me or tear out my eyes or burn me alive and put me back together again til I say Yes_.

“Sam,” the Lightbringer croons, “you were always mine. You always will be.”

There are hands on his cheeks, stroking, gentle — a thumb brushing over his cheekbone, fingers sliding down the side of his throat — and the pressure finally bursts, driving the air out of his lungs so swiftly it leaves him gasping. He’s at the eye of a storm. Reeling. Buzzing. Charged and loosened like there’s morphine in his veins or demon blood slipping over his tongue and oh God he should be jerking back like his life depends on it, Hell, his  _soul_  depends on it, but all he can think to say is, ”Your hands are cold,” and his own voice sounds a million miles away.

At the very least Sam has enough presence of mind in the midst of drowning in the Morning Star’s intoxicating Grace to seize him by the shoulders when he starts to press closer. It’s a vain attempt at best to hold the Devil at bay: human strength is nothing compared to that of an angel.

Lucifer doesn’t apologise. That’s not his style. “We all burn in different ways,” he explains instead. His touch is reverent and proprietary all at once: exploring as if Sam is a priceless, hard-won relic. Maybe he is, in Lucifer’s eyes, but the hunter reminds himself that he’s not won yet, and by God he’ll stay that way.

But it’s so damned easy to let his eyes close and the grip on one of Lucifer’s shoulders loosen enough to slip down to the blond’s side. Feels like he could breathe in the crackling waves of — whatever this is dancing over his skin like a cloud of smoke, fill his lungs with it, let it dance in his blood and flood his cells. He hears himself half-whimper, half-growl in protest to a hand slipping under his shirt. Rough fingers trace the contours of his side, the dips and swells of firm muscle across his quaking belly and chest; they chill his nipples into hard peaks and brush through the dusting of hair over his sternum, then sweep down with a flattening palm over the arch of a hip, up his spine, drifting across his arms. He tenses when Lucifer’s touch strokes firm across his ass down his thighs only to drag back up and slip along the sharp line of his pelvis again. All the while Lucifer watches the human, blue eyes seeking hazel, as if he’s feeding on what he finds there. Sam’s teeth sink into the meat of his lip. Neither of them needs to glance down to know how his body reacts; that it goes unmentioned is a small blessing.

The rational parts of his brain rattle and rail against this, screaming out the _wrongness_  of everything that’s happening here. Every instinct is snarling back that it’s right — that he’s been waiting a lifetime for this high, that he’s a breath away from filling a hollow that’s ached in him from the start. The war between id and ego has him tugging Lucifer closer and pushing him away all at once.

“Stop,” he breathes, “I can’t— I can’t.”

For a moment it seems the archangel might just have decided he doesn’t need to listen; but he sighs out a breath that freezes the droplet of sweat trickling down from his temple, and murmurs into the hollow of his throat, “Not tonight.”

Something inside him pulls against the coruscation of Grace as Lucifer turns to glide away; at a certain distance — a number of paces Sam forgets to count — they snap apart, and he feels the sudden loss like a blow, like an amputation. It leaves him lucid enough to start feeling properly mortified. “What…what  _was_  that?”

Lucifer glances over his shoulder. There’s a hungry gleam in his eyes now. The air around him seems to shimmer with something barely contained. Given half a chance Sam’s sure he’d be right back where he had been. He half-turns towards Sam, smirking. “Just a taste.”

And Sam’s alone in the room, falling away from the dream.

In the morning he’s chilled to the bone and hard as a rock, and if that isn’t the most awkward damned combination of things to wake up to he’s not sure what is. He tries for a lukewarm shower to address both issues at once but the water only reminds him of too-cool hands and icy blue eyes. He spits curses under his breath, shakes his head, and gives up. It takes far too much effort to think about  _anyone else_  as he pumps his fist, mechanical and too firm; and even then his climax is a hollow relief at best.

Times like this, he wishes he still believed there’d be a point to praying for guidance, much less salvation.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer tries to show Sam what he’s really after, but the archangel’s the one in for a surprise tonight. Lucifer’s POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _For ages to come, Lucifer will think back on this moment and wonder how the blue fuck a human managed to find just the right words to not only strike him speechless but actually feel personal affront amid a mountain of disappointment._
> 
> _He’s still a bit slack-jawed when Sam’s smugness softens, when he leans further into the charged space between them. “Or I guess you could let me burn out, but then you’d be alone again. It’s hard, huh, trying to balance being independent and not being lonely all the time.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Covenant: [Final Man](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztEX_uEwFko); Lucifer » Dave Matthews Band: [When the World Ends (Oakenfold Remix)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf4_g8fyOXI)

“This is the part where I yell at you and you ignore it,” he says wryly without opening his eyes. He’s curled up on his side, long limbs sprawling as if they’ve abandoned all hope of finding a comfortable position in favour of flopping out at random. (It isn’t that “waking up” shivering from the Fallen archangel’s proximity doesn’t faze him. More just that these past nights of  _not_  being pressured or tortured to say Yes have made it easier to affect annoyance. Dean would be proud.)  
  
“Sam….” For once it isn’t chastising; for all the world it sounds like a wake-up call. “I was actually hoping we could skip the yelling part tonight. You know I  _like_  your temper but I want you to see this.”  
  
“I’m officially worried.” The hunter cranes his face down into — that isn’t a pillow. Soft, yes, yielding, not so much. Lucifer smiles like a cat as he watches realisation dawn on Sam’s features. “What the….”  
  
He’s on his feet in a whirlwind of defensive motion, knees bent, eyes wide, hands held loose enough to become a shove, seize, or strike with equal ease. Lucifer rises from his crouch to track Sam’s movements, to follow his gaze as he takes in their surroundings. Trees tower above them on all sides, a dense, endless forest stretching as far as the eye can see, white and black bark gleaming in the sunlight that flows down through the canopy in golden-green ribbons. Ferns reaching waist-high to Sam and rougher bushes heavy with blackberries fill out a sparse undergrowth in bright patches of colour amid leaf litter and moss-coated rocks. Somewhere in the distance he catches the babble of a creek.   
  
“This is….” Sam gulps, and when he murmurs “This is beautiful” with quiet reverence the Morning Star’s smile is as bright as his namesake. The human twists to fix his eyes on the archangel. “Where is this?”  
  
Lucifer tips up his chin, pacing off to one side to trail his fingers across a patch of lichen on the nearest trunk. “An Iberian beech forest I visited once, about seventy thousand years ago.” It’s all he can do not to gloat over the way Sam chokes.  
  
“I’ve never been to Spain. How— how am I dreaming this?” He glances up and around, then back at Lucifer, wary now. “You did this? You changed — you made this dream?”   
  
The notion seems to upset him. Lucifer isn’t sure why. So she shrugs and reassures his vessel: “You could probably do the same to me if I dreamed.”  
  
Sam’s jaw falls open, then snaps shut, and he ducks his head with a rueful grin. “Right. The whole…’meant to be’ crap. I thought that only went one way.” His eyes narrow. Wheels are turning. Good. The angel only shrugs again and holds out a hand.  
  
“We’re not exactly pressed for time here,” he deflects. “C’mon, Sam. Let me show you the world in my eyes.”   
  
Whatever protest along the lines of  _Dude no I’m not holding your freaking hand_  was about to fall from Sam’s lips dies, and instead he sputters, “Did you just quote Depeche Mode at me?” (He really, really doesn’t want to contemplate the possible implications of the song choice if he did, either.)  
  
“Mm, did I?” Lucifer says breezily, eyes cast upward. He lets his hand fall and starts walking. After a hesitation that he’s confident is just for show, the shuffle of footsteps behind him announces that his human is following after all.  
  
Time’s a funny thing in dreams. They could have been there for seconds or hours or days, hiking through what seems to be an endless woodland untouched by man. They come by clearings, startle quail, skip across brooks, traipse down great fallen logs heavy with fungus and sidle through cracks in boulders the size of cabins. They lapse into a strangely companionable silence punctuated by Lucifer pointing out one thing or another, and Sam’s muted exclamations of wonder. Seventy millennia ago he was the one starting around in awe but his Grace aches at the memory of how very alone he’d been.  
  
Not this time around.  
  
There are deer trails, but no hiking trails; furrows eaten through bark by larvae and rodents rather than initials carved with pocket knives; songbirds and falcons flit overhead, but no aircraft; the air is heavy with the dark scents of loam and dew, but not a whiff of exhaust or hot metal. “Lemme guess,” Sam finally ventures, “there’s not a road for miles here.”  
  
The look Lucifer gives him does a good job of conveying that he ought to know better. “There won’t be for tens of thousands of years.” (Sam chokes again. Lucifer decides he quite likes the way his forehead smooths out when he’s taken off guard. He doesn’t intend to make such a face once he’s wearing that skin, but for now it’s utterly charming.) “It’s a memory, not time travel, if that’s what you’re thinking…but, you know, whenever you decide to let me know where you’re hiding, we could see the real deal. I find I much prefer it to this.”  
  
He snaps his fingers and Sam reels as the world shifts around him. The trees and birdsong are gone, replaced far too rapidly by buildings stained by centuries of urban grime, glaring lights, the acrid stench of automobiles, the swelter of pedestrians pressing around them. It hits him like a sledgehammer to the gut.  
  
To Sam’s mortified, questioning look he explains, ”We haven’t moved. This is the same place, as it is today.” He can feel Sam’s gaze on him as clearly as he can the tension in his jaw or the bitterness tainting his tone. ”They call it Madrid now, I believe.”  
  
”That’s…wow. A big change.” Sam eases closer through the crowd of indistinct people who seem oblivious to dreamer and angel alike. Lucifer snorts, half at the understatement, half in amusement over the caution in Sam’s voice. ”It must’ve come as a shock.”  
  
All it takes is a half-turn and they’re in each other’s space. His Grace reaches out with a snap, and he can’t help but stare at the way his true vessel’s pupils widen and breath hitches, nor ignore his own reaction’s similarity. It brings to mind skimming the atmosphere from above, the sensation of something vast and scalding pushing against his wings,daring him to burst through. Nick’s mouth is annoyingly dry.  
  
”Time heals all wounds, your people claim,” he murmurs, and his Grace sizzles when Sam leans closer to hear. ”But wounds leave a mark. Hold still, I’ll show you.”  
  
Of course, ”hold still” seems to be code for ”start struggling” to the Winchesters, so naturally Sam jerks back the moment Lucifer reaches for him. Not fast enough: the Lightbringer grabs him above the elbows — and there it is, the burn of re-entry scorching into his icy core, a warm comfort like the sun, an absolute certainty that this is his and where they both belong. A wail rattles the back of Sam’s throat just barely on the right side of agony; his nails catch Lucifer’s skin through his shirts in a blind scrabble for purchase.  
  
Heaving a breath, Lucifer stares into the sky. Sam follows the gaze just in time to see clouds roil, darken, and churn into a funnel filled with lightning. To his dawning horror what comes streaking down from its heart is a meteor; he can only watch, slack-jawed, as it seems to come down in slow motion. A ripple of panic runs through the dream-folk around them until it’s a tidal wave and they’re screaming, running, horns blaring — it meets the earth hard enough to make the sidewalk beneath their feet pitch like the deck of a ship. There’s a sound so low it’s felt rather than heard long, aching seconds before the explosion sends a column of flame and dust, dust that was a city, into the air and blows out the glass in a shower that should rip them to shreds but somehow leaves them untouched. Sam bellows in terror, surging against Lucifer’s grip, but he doesn’t have a —ha — chance in Hell of breaking it.  
  
The moment the blast wave hits them time seems to speed up exponentially. The two of them look on as Madrid drowns in dust, then burns, then cracks asunder; humans flee and riot, loot what they can and search for survivors; storms and earthquakes wrack the already-crumbling buildings and flood the streets; and as the years tick by in seconds there are fewer and fewer people — there, a small resurgence, then gone again — until finally they’re watching the city rot and plant life begins taking over, crushing the remains of scorched stone edifices and splintered asphalt. Season after season races by and wildlife returns, then trees, and the buildings grow so thick with vines and moss they resemble the rocks on which Sam “awoke” tonight. Unattended, the mighty buildings fall, and their remains are claimed by wilderness as well, swallowed by soil. By the time this progression of centuries comes to a stop they’re standing in a forest again: it isn’t beech and birch and blackberries this time around, but it’s every bit as breathtaking as it was seventy thousand years ago, even as the forgotten, overgrown graveyard of mankind’s fall.  
  
It takes Sam several minutes to find words. “This is what you want, huh,” he gulps at last.  
  
“It’ll never be the same,” Lucifer nods, “but once we’ve won, it will heal.”  
  
Sam stares at him with an expression the archangel can’t read for a long time. He makes another, a sort of incredulous grin, and bursts out laughing. Lucifer scowls out his confusion and Sam laughs harder; he lets go, takes a step back, and Sam is still laughing. “What,” he huffs. Being laughed at is new and he’s already decided he doesn’t like it.  
  
“So, so this is what your Apocalypse is about?” Sam gasps, holding a hand to his face. “You’re basically just a supercharged eco-terrorist?! Oh my God.”  
  
Lucifer still doesn’t see what’s so funny. He just shared something fairly intimate — his memories, his endgame, to say nothing of his Grace. There’s nothing about that he can imagine is cause for a laughing fit. Eventually Sam must clue in on the way the Morning Star is starting to seethe because he raises his eyebrows again and gives an apologetic shake of his head, choking down his fit into breathless chuckling. “Man I know I’ve gotta be signing my death warrant but wow. I just…I did not see that coming.”  
  
“This is a joke to you?” All the times Lucifer’s spoken softly to him before now has been a matter of reassurance and confidence. Not this time. Power and pique roll off him like a static charge and these, too, reach out to Sam instinctively. That at least finally manages to quell the laughter.  
  
“No,” the hunter answers, face gone sober, “no I get it, you’re serious as a heart attack. Maybe — maybe this’ll happen on its own eventually. The dinosaurs didn’t last forever either and they didn’t exactly have war machines to help them along.” He pauses, shifts his weight, stuffs his hands into his pockets, and looks around them again. “But. Which is it: d’you really hate us that much that you wanna use scorched earth tactics just to get rid of us, or d’you just really miss how this place, Earth I mean, looked last time you were here?”  
  
The archangel tilts his head, and takes a moment to consider before he responds. “Why should it be one or the other and not both? I had a long time to get acquainted with this planet before Michael threw me into the Cage, Sam, and it was all because of humanity. Now I come back to find you’ve taken that from me, too. They’ll never let me go home but at least I could have this much. And this time I won’t be alone.”  
  
This close, he can feel something that’s tugged at him before in the darkness of the Pit: loneliness. Not his own. Sam’s. His human (oh, he’s still cursing his Father for the cruelty of that) has a vicarious ache in him that feeds on what’s already there. The idea of being pitied by a man when his own brothers have denied him mercy is nothing short of disgusting; but at the same time there’s a sense of validation knowing someone — this someone in particular, the only human who’s ever mattered — has some sympathy for the Devil. He’d very much like to imagine that the aborted movement in Sam’s hand was an impulse to reach out.  
  
“I know what it’s like to know you can’t ever go home, believe me. But you don’t make a new home by burning someone else’s down.” Sam speaks with the same quiet conviction that Lucifer himself has used. That has him rocking back on his heels and Winchester seems to sense the opening it presents. “Look man, it’s not all bad. We’re not all bad, you gotta know that if you’ve been keeping tabs on us all this time.”  
  
Lucifer squints at him and folds his arms over his chest. “I’ve had longer to think about this than you can comprehend,” he says crisply. Something scratches at the inside of his Grace, scritching and tapping out a warning.  _Losing him losing him he’s so close_. “Besides, my methods beat nuclear winter, don’t they?”  
  
Sam’s mouth twists as he nods sideways, perhaps a little testily. “Between the two, sure, but there’s never only just two choices.” The hunter stares a moment more, huffs out a sigh, and…turns to start walking. It’s Lucifer’s turn now to blink at Sam’s back before following along after him.  
  
“Sam?” he calls, “Where are you going?”  
  
“You wanted me to see this place, right? This future you think there’ll be, what, with you and me in one body as the only sentient life left on the planet? Well I’m looking.” He doesn’t bother even glancing over his shoulder. For some damned reason that gives the Lightbringer another stab of pique — enough so that he stretches his wings to catch up to Sam in the blink of an eye.  
  
So they lapse back into silence as they pick their way across the reclaimed Iberian wilderness side-by-side. The air of wonder’s been traded out for sullen tension. No matter how much he yearns to regain those moments of near-trust, Lucifer is far too proud to contemplate apology. Time will heal the wound, he assures himself, even if it’s never quite the way it was before. Their fate demands it.  
  
As it happens, Winchester is the one who takes command of the situation once again. They’re making their way through the narrow passage between a dense tangle of trees and a cliff that was a cathedral centuries ago when he turns, snapping out an arm to block Lucifer’s way. The archangel stops short and gives him a patient, questioning look that doesn’t at all match the desperate throb of Grace under his skin, straining for flesh and soul alike. At least he has the satisfaction of knowing Sam isn’t as good at containing his response to this magnetism.  
  
And yet against all odds, Sam still manages to level a very specifically fed-up bitchface at the Morning Star, and further stuns him by declaring, “Your endgame’s pretty but it’s also bookless and boring.” It’s all Lucifer can do not to gape. “I w— look I’m not saying I agree with you on whether or not I’ll say you-know-what, but worst-case scenario, this happens and we really are the only intelligent life left? I swear” (and now he’s chuckling and Lucifer does gape just a little at the sheer _cheek_ ) “I will find a way to drive you so completely out of your mind you’ve got no choice but to let me take back over — and then I’ll freaking run us through on your sword just to escape the boredom. Okay?”  
  
For ages to come, Lucifer will think back on this moment and wonder how the blue fuck a human managed to find just the right words to not only strike him speechless but actually feel personal affront amid a mountain of disappointment.  
  
He’s still a bit slack-jawed when Sam’s smugness softens, when he leans further into the charged space between them. “Or I guess you could let me burn out, but then you’d be alone again. It’s hard, huh, trying to balance being independent and not being lonely all the time.”  
  
That snaps Lucifer out of it. “I didn’t choose to be alone the last six million years,” he snaps. Part of him takes pleasure in seeing Sam taken aback so he presses on with ice in his voice (and presses in to close the gap even more). “Fifty thousand on Earth’s time, Sam, but in Hell it was  _six. Million_. Alone, in a pit of perfect cold and endless darkness, hearing nothing but my own screams and the blasphemous, disgusting ‘prayers’ of demons. You have a fraction of my anger and yes, my loneliness, my dispossession, in your soul, but only a fraction, so do not presume to lecture me on either rebellion or loneliness, because I was the  _first_   _being_  to understand these things.”  
  
The waking world would be shaking apart for a thousand miles in every direction had they met there. He  _wants_  to hurt Sam, to punish him terribly, but he promised. He promised. It does help that Sam seems to understand, again, what a fine line he’s treading, and lowers his head in what might be respect.  
  
Quiet still, the hunter admits, “You were right about one thing. I can’t comprehend being locked up that long. To be honest, I can’t wrap my head around  _existing_  that long. I know. I’m human, and therefore limited. Sorry.” The smile he flashes is, in fact, apologetic. Now he fidgets a little. His arm drops as if he’s only just remembered he’d been purposefully boxing Lucifer in with his body (or at least indulging in the illusion of such). “…Um. You…I thought you got thrown into Hell when you first rebelled, but then you said you, Iunno, toured the planet I guess.”  
  
Lucifer sighs. Apparently his human has as little sense of subtlety under duress as he has taste in shirts. “It happened in two parts, actually. Dad kicked me out of His house when I questioned Him about… _you_ ” (he makes an up-and-down gesture at Sam and Nick’s bodies both) “…so I spent a while walking the Earth. Then there was a certain incident in a garden where I offered someone else free will in the hopes that your kind could…improve, and for that He had Michael lock me away.”  
  
Well that’s a truncated version of how it went down, anyway. If Sam doubts this is entirely accurate (and his schooled expression suggests exactly that) he’s wise enough to keep his mouth shut about it this time. He does furrow his brow and duck his head, though, shoulders hunching in a shrug. “It’s just kinda weird. If angels weren’t meant to have free will or question orders, why were you even capable of doing it in the first place?” Hazel eyes flick back up at the end.  
  
The laugh that cracks out of Lucifer’s throat is bitter as wormwood. The same can be said of his smile. “I’ve been asking that for a long, long time.”  
  
Sam pulls a face. “I guess neither of our fathers were real good at communication.” He’s watching the archangel with an intensity that belies his conversational tone. Gears are still turning, and they steer the conversation in yet another direction. A hand comes up to hover over Lucifer’s chest as if there’s an invisible force keeping him from touching. “…It’s like one’a those plasma globes,” Sam mutters, eyes wide. The reference falls flat so he explains, “Feels like there’s an electric current or something that’s gonna zap me any moment now. What is that? Is this how you make storms and blow out lights and stuff?”  
  
“Yes and no,” Lucifer answers carefully. “It’s my Grace and your soul reaching out to each other. They’re trying to fill in what’s missing. There’s been a hole in you all your life, hasn’t there, and you just can’t fill it no matter how hard you try. Not with family, or women, or killing monsters, or saving lives, or that charade of normalcy you were playing at for a while. It’s a wrongness in you, an ache that never goes away. Part of what keeps you from ever fitting in is that piece that’s missing inside you.” Fingers close around Sam’s still-hovering wrist to tug the man’s palm against his body. Their breath catches on the breaking pressure. “That missing piece is me.”  
  
No groans this time. Just the hiss of air leaving lungs. All at once Lucifer finds himself shoved against the viney stones with the long line of Sam’s body pressed into him, seeking that sparking energy like a drug. It washes over again — the radiant feeling of being nearly perfect — and for a moment it’s enough to delay his bafflement over this new position, much less the half-questing nudge of his true vessel’s face into the crook of his neck. “Sam…?!”  
  
This is new. The Morning Star is not naïve; but this is new, and so very human.  
  
“Shut up,” Sam mutters at him. The only thing that stands in the way of his flaring umbrage for such disrespect is the shock of teeth on his skin, teeth, and his own mouth clicks shut. The archangel smirks: broad hands roughened by years of grave digging and knife-fighting shove their way under Nick’s shirts to slip into the small of his back, settle on his hips, smooth along his ribs and belly just as Lucifer had done before. His vessel’s soul is bright enough to burn marks in his borrowed skin, or so it seems — but those are merely welts left by Sam’s nails digging in. Sam tenses, lets out a broken noise, when Lucifer’s still-unseen wings bend around to brush across his back.  
  
It’s so human. It’s base at best — tainted by physicality. This is beneath him; but this is  _his_  all the same,  _his_  fate-bound body, and though cerebrally he knows this is honestly kind of gross it feels like a homecoming anyway.  
  
“Sam. What do you want?” He seeks out contact with hazel eyes gone glassy-drunk.  
  
The hunter makes a pinched expression. He’s breathing quicker and more shallowly than he ought, even lost in the comfort and pleasure of shared touch, and once he’s swallowed a lump in his throat his words come out in little wisps against the Lightbringer’s lips. “I think I want to wake up before I do something really, really stupid.”  
  
Lucifer frowns a little and cocks his head. That, apparently, is enough to prompt Sam to do something monumentally stupid anyway: to wit, he fits his mouth over the archangel’s and leans into him again. At first Lucifer’s unresponsive (taking a moment to assess the situation) and Sam keeps it chaste, but once he sucks at Sam’s lower lip and rests his hands on sharp hipbones, it’s no holds barred. The angel finds his lips bitten and teased open, nape held still by a cradling hand while its partner jerks his hips forward by the belt, and he’s reeling with shock and pride over his vessel being so demanding of him until the slick heat of Sam’s tongue invades his mouth — and at that, he balks, and thrusts them both apart (Sam into wakefulness, Lucifer into solidity) with a chorus of rustling wings.  
  
The next day he feels the cold more keenly than he has since before his Grace froze over in the Cage. He ignores the adulations of triumphant demons in favour of brooding in the caldera of Pico do Fogo all day. It reacts to his Grace by spewing lava. As violent as the eruption is, Lucifer is still cold, and incomplete, and alone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neither of them really wants to talk about the end of the world tonight, but Lucifer’s there for a reason, and Sam is about to cross a line. Sam’s POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _The reasonable way of looking at it is that Lucifer, an angel, has no gender, and the promise of not hurting Sam surely extends to…whatever the Hell they’re getting themselves into. This is a creature whose real body probably doesn't remotely resemble a human in the first place, a formerly-divine entity that might well be older than the solar system. The very idea that he wants to bed Sam in the first place is a far bigger deal than the mechanics being suggested here._
> 
>   _The even more reasonable way of looking at it is that Satan wants to fuck him in the ass and if he had half a working brain he’d run for the hills instead of trying to figure out the safest way to grab his ankles._
> 
> _Sam, being a Winchester, is not always that reasonable a man._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Collide: [Wings of Steel](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH_YAM0U5yo); Lucifer » Jay Gordon: [Slept So Long](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyzqtyQYJjo); Bonus Track » Nine Inch Nails: [Something I Can Never Have](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3UW0-fgGsw)
> 
> Hover over the Enochian lines for the translation and pronunciation.

“So we’re back to motel rooms.” This one isn’t as run-down as the others, perhaps, but still no better than what he’s grown accustomed to over the years. Aging wallpaper and cigarette burns in the carpet, cheap scuffed furniture, a pair of beds too short for someone his height. It’s the first time there have been two rather than one, though, and he immediately wonders on whose state of mind that reflects more. He sits on the edge of one with his back turned, knowing exactly what the Devil’s about to say.

“Sam.” Lucifer does not disappoint. Why break pattern now? There’s a flatness in his voice tonight that might be unease coming from anybody — any _thing_  else, but it’s still firm enough to be a demand for attention.

And Winchester does look over his shoulder at where the archangel stands in the narrow aisle between beds, all loose limbs and leonine aplomb. He hopes the fact that he has to swallow before acknowledging him with a wry, “Here I thought I’d scared you off or something,” escapes notice.

It doesn’t.

“I’ve spent the majority of your species’ history in Hell,” Lucifer deadpans; “there isn’t much of anything left for me to fear.”

Only by a very narrow margin does Sam manage to bite his tongue quick enough to avoid popping off with something about Michael or being alone. Let’s not taunt the Devil this early in the night. He’s opened up before (even if it was a bizarre and frankly depressing attempt at temptation) and it’s the first glimmer of hope Sam’s had since Ruby’s betrayal. “It’s been a few days is all.”

“You’ve missed me.” That has Lucifer straightening, blinking, tilting his head. A smile spreads slow across his face. There are laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. It’s too human, too wholesome, and the old nausea claws its way through Sam’s gut to look too long; so he turns away, but he can still feel him like a trickle of ice water and paranoia pattering down the back of his neck.

“The volcano in Cape Verde. That was you, wasn’t it.” Sam can feel his face harden. The carpet muffles the footsteps behind him but not so much that he’s taken off-guard to find the Devil at his elbow. He expects him to loom, to hover now that he has the height advantage, but instead Lucifer sinks down to sit nearby. The sudden cold combined with the now-familiar narcotic thrumming between them damn near makes him forget what he was saying. He hasn’t missed Satan but he’s sure as Hell missed that. “A lot of innocent people died,” he growls between his teeth.

That garners exactly as much of a sympathetic, apologetic response from the archangel as one might expect — which is to say, well less than none. He stares at Sam with that patient look of his as if asking the hunter to go on with explaining how this is at all significant. It makes Sam’s eyes narrow and lip curl in disgust.

“Right,” he snorts, staring down at his own hands “like you care. Of course. Probably not nearly enough for your tastes.”

When Lucifer just arches his eyebrows Sam really isn’t sure what he expects next. Maybe some arrogant lecture about how no humans are innocent and it doesn’t matter anyway because volcanoes were erupting long before Lucifer walked the earth, and it’s hardly his fault if people chose to build their towns right inside an active caldera. What he is not expecting is the sensation of something half-liquid, freezing-cold, and electric to slide up and over his shoulder and side. It’s familiar — a surge of power he’s felt from the archangel before, as recent as the incident in “future Spain” — but never this clearly. It’s like the whisper of fingertips.  _No_ , Sam thinks, eyes growing painfully wide as he stares at the seemingly-empty air around his arm,  _more like…feathers_.

May it never be said that Lucifer doesn’t know how to derail a conversation he doesn’t feel like having.

“What the Hell,” Sam blurts. He levels an accusatory stare at the archangel, who meets it with a mild look before sliding his gaze off to an indistinct point on the far wall.

“You disapprove. I don’t need your approval. Let’s be honest with ourselves here Sam. This isn’t a productive vein of discussion and neither of us are really interested in it.” The matter-of-factness of it (to say nothing of the fact that it wasn’t what he was talking about, not really) leaves Sam slack-jawed and straight-backed. Glacial blue eyes scan back to fix on his, and he finds himself short of breath all over again. “We’re fated for each other but that doesn’t mean we won’t disagree on some things. If only because you are almost as stubborn as I am despite being wrong.”

What else can he do? Taken utterly by surprise, the hunter bursts out laughing — honest, open laughter — and shakes his head, swaying back in the course of it far enough for their shoulders to brush together. “Us disagreeing. Kind of an understatement.”

“I don’t want to destroy Earth, Sam.”

“I know. Not Earth. Just us.” His grin falters. When the Devil wears such an inscrutable expression he finds himself remembering that this creature was, or is rather, an angel after all. A twisted, bitter, genocidal, remorseless, Fallen angel who holds humanity in the same esteem that most people hold fleas. Coming to think of it, with the exception of the Winchesters’ trenchcoated sometimes-companion, that apparently isn’t too different from the angels still aligned with Heaven. Now there’s a depressing thought.

Still, if Sam is anything it’s an optimist, so he puts all the conviction he used to have for his faith in God into telling the Devil, “It doesn’t have to go down that way.”

“It has to, Sam.” The archangel’s tone too dead to even qualify as resigned. “You should trust me when I tell you this discussion isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

That shakes the hunter out of the — what was even going on in his head?! Hard enough to think with that pressure between them driving him to distraction. He’s craved it like he used to crave demon blood. He’s missed it like a lover’s touch. Now it’s crowding around him so thick it feels like a fog he can barely see through. “If you didn’t come here to tempt me or talk about the Apocalypse,” Sam ventures (and he can hear the trepidation in his own voice), “why are you here?”

“The same reason you’re sitting here under my wing instead of running away,” Lucifer says, reasonably, and Sam chokes a little.

“Under your— so you really have— wait are you being literal or just messing with me?” His eyes train in on the shorter man’s back. To all appearances, of course, he’s only just a man. Sam tries to imagine what they look like: black-feathered and broad like a bird of prey, or batlike leather the way Satan’s so often depicted, or broken at the root by his Fall and torn into Hell-scorched tatters.

Lucifer glances at him with a glimmer of annoyance. “Of course I do,” he says with the air of someone who’s been asked if he actually has a nose. Well. That answers the second question too, doesn’t it.

Sam spends another moment staring at Nick’s shoulder blades. He catches his hand reaching out unbidden, and jerks it back as if bitten, mortified to his core. Fuck. Fuck.

As reading his mind, the Devil smirks at him and explains, “Human senses are too limited to see them under most circumstances. Or feel them for that matter.” But Sam can feel them, oh he does, sliding over his far side like plasma — a state of matter for which there isn’t a name in any human language. “Curiosity is a good thing, Sam. Just ask.”

His mouth’s gone dry. “…Can you _make_  them visible? Here?” Something terrible occurs to him and he adds, “Oh God wait they’re not gonna burn my eyes out of their sockets are they?”

“You’re my true vessel, Sam,” he’s told patiently. Lucifer shifts further onto the bed to face the hunter. “The assumption there is you should be able to see what I really look like and hear my real Voice” (it’s funny how sometimes you can just hear the capital letter and this is one of those times) “without it hurting you, not really. And if I’m wrong?” Lucifer shrugs, chin pushed out as if the prospect of Sam’s brain exploding is no big deal, and only smirks at the bitchface he catches for it. “I’ll just put you back together again. An angel’s wings are only a small part of the true form. This shouldn’t hurt.”

Sucking in a breath to steel himself, Sam nods, and watches.

A sound akin to feedback makes his head swim and jaw ache. The room grows brighter, brighter, centred on the serene blond man sitting beside Sam on an old motel bed. There’s nothing holy about the light — not anymore — but it feels like the glow of a cleansing flame when it flares so bright Sam’s heart skips, fearing he might go blind after all. The room around them flickers back to the memory of a chapel, to Lilith’s blood flowing in a spiral on the floor that formed a portal; he remembers how he’d expected fire or darkness to come gushing out from the Cage, not light. Not a column of pure white racing into the sky. And now he understands. It wasn’t just a light show: that had been  _Lucifer_.

“Sam. Stay with me.”

The voice shouldn’t ground him but it does. His heart hammers in his chest. The hunter yelps when what look for all the world like bolts of blue-white lightning streak out from Lucifer’s back. They fan out, sizzling, geniculating at random, spreading in a rippling liquid mesh shaped roughly like feathers. As they drift and wave Sam realises he isn’t looking at a single pair of wings but three. The blue shifts to a reddish tinge that looks almost pink against the formations’ own intense light.

Well. No.  _Very_ pink.

Sam instantly resolves that not in a million years will he comment to Satan about having hot pink sparkly wings.

“Oh my God,” he whispers breathlessly, because what else can you say to something like that?

“Uncouth choice of words, Sam,” Lucifer chides, and the hunter actually feels chastised for some stupid reason. The lowermost pair float forward to drape across Sam’s shoulders down his back. The touch makes every hair on his body stand up, makes his brain short-circuit; distantly he hears his own voice shatter around the sort of cry normally only heard from between bedsheets or a woman’s thighs. This time, at least, that almost-liquid brush makes some logical sense in his mind; it’s no less unnerving now that he can see what’s causing it but it’s easier to process. It occurs to him that there’s some solidity to them after all but he isn’t really _thinking_  when he reaches up into them as if grabbing hold will steady him.

“Shit. Jesus, Lucifer,” he chokes; the archangel is a bit too shocked to scold him this time. The space they occupy is gelatin-thick. The shapes that aren’t quite feathers form a spark gap with his hands, filling them with a pins-and-needles sensation. Once again he’s reminded of plasma lamps — especially now that he can see the energy trails dancing across his skin.

Just as shocking is what he sees in Lucifer’s face when he looks up. His eyes are wide, pupils dilated, and his stare is so intense Sam knows he ought to be terrified. Every rational part of him is. The blond’s borrowed body has gone so tense and still Sam isn’t sure he’s breathing — not that he’s sure angels really need to breathe in the first place. Then all at once he’s rising to his knees and crowding Sam back, further up the bed, and the human’s mind screams  _oh God oh God what am I doing oh God could I be any more stupid_  as he lets go of the wing in favour of balling his fists in Lucifer’s shirts. Cold fingers jerk his own shirt loose and slip beneath, pushing him down, and he fights down a whimper at finding himself sandwiched between the Jacob’s ladder of those wings and the weight of the Devil’s body resting atop him.

The touch of skin against skin brings the rush he’s come to anticipate, the sheer relief of Lucifer’s Grace washing over him. It’s chipping away at his will to resist the idea that fate led him to the Devil. He shoves the button-down shirt off Lucifer’s shoulders and it doesn’t feel like compromise. He writhes to let his own tee get pulled up over his head and it doesn’t feel like surrender. Sam grapples at broad shoulders, reaching around to spread his fingers through the crackling juncture of back and wings. Lucifer bucks upwards away from the hunter (not enough, Sam notes, to dislodge his hands) and stares down with a look of bewildered disgust.

“What are you  _doing_  to me?” Something in his tone suggests he doesn’t mean the wing-groping.

Sam adds another tick to his “bitchface at Satan” quota for the night. He threads a grip into sandy hair and tugs him back down. There’s no earthly way he’d be able to force the archangel to move if he didn’t allow it — if he didn’t  _want_  to move.

_I’m here for the same reason you are._

“Look man don’t ruin the mood,” he huffs against Lucifer’s mouth. “This is already awkward enough with you in a male vessel, alright.” (To wit, he’s officially rated this as the single most awkward erection he’s had in his life.)

“Mm. He was the most suitable choice on short notice since you didn’t stick around to say hello after letting me out,” comes the wry retort while Sam’s mouthing the Devil’s jaw and throat. “That…and you know I fully intend to be inside you.”

The hunter’s head swims. His brain can’t seem to decide which oath or curse he should be sputtering so he has to make do with an incoherent groan on his way up to crush his lips against Lucifer’s, to set about trying to lick his way into the mouth beyond. There, finally, is some proper terror feeding the desperation in his kiss, making his stomach jump under exploring hands, quickening his breath. There’s no question in his mind that the creature curled over him, ancient and alien as it may be, is naïve enough for that to’ve been anything but an entendre. And Sam, he—

He’s never. It’s never been an urge. It’s never been asked. There was an incident of drunken frottage at Stanford, one they’d agreed the next day was fine but just a one-time thing they never brought up again. There’d been a man in Ohio with brazen eyes and a sinful mouth, down on his knees for Sam in a custodial locker room. One-offs. Nothing more.

In the dream (and it’s hard to remember sometimes that that’s what it is, as real as everything feels) he isn’t thinking about them. Too caught up in the flow of comforting Grace and crepitant wings and the Devil’s own hands palming the muscles of his chest, too lost in teasing a reluctant mouth with thrusts and flickers of his tongue. But he’s never, and it has his heart stuttering in trepidation.

The reasonable way of looking at it is that Lucifer, an angel, has no gender, and the promise of not hurting Sam surely extends to…whatever the Hell they’re getting themselves into. This is a creature whose real body probably doesn’t remotely resemble a human in the first place, a formerly-divine entity that might well be older than the solar system. The very idea that he wants to bed Sam in the first place is a far bigger deal than the mechanics being suggested here.

The even more reasonable way of looking at it is that Satan wants to fuck him in the ass and if he had half a working brain he’d run for the hills instead of trying to figure out the safest way to grab his ankles.

Sam, being a Winchester, is not always that reasonable a man.

“One step at a time,” he finally answers on a shivering breath. The hunter releases his fistful of blond hair in favour of the older man’s fly. “Last time you freaked and flew off soon as I licked your tongue. Could we just…I’unno, work up to it?”

Lucifer rests his face in the crook of Sam’s neck and shoulder with a frustrated growl. Once his jeans button pops open, broad (shaking) hands work his zipper down and Sam keeps talking — as much to steady himself through this as to try to work his way under the Devil’s skin, his mad, inchoate scheme to lead the Dark Lord Himself astray. It’s crazy and stupid and desperate and he’s certain it might just work because Winchesters do best when they think outside the box.

“I know,” he hears himself babble between nipping along Lucifer’s jaw and palming a half-mast cock, “you’ve waited a long time already. A really long time. It’s just I haven’t — not this way and I get the feeling it’ll be a first for you too, right? Shit, though, look what you do to me.”

Barely coherent, Sam slides a grip down a forearm to grasp Lucifer by a wrist, tugs that hand down to press against his own groin where he’s so hard he’s damn near ready to burn a hole through his pants. He holds it there when the angel makes an aborted attempt to pull away, eyes flinching in a flare of something like panic and revulsion; but Lucifer collects himself before his human can really process what he saw. Sam can waste time with fiddly things like buttons and zippers if he likes. That’s for people who aren’t strong enough to rip denim like tissue paper.

“Okay,” Sam blurts in shock. “That uh, that works too.” He swallows a lump in his throat and arches up his hips. Blue eyes bore into him; not for the first time Sam finds himself crushed beneath the Devil’s gaze, short of breath and speechless in the face of such possessive need. Their hips roll against each other, dragging another growl out of the archangel and a broken answer from the human. The wings wrapped around his back remain in motion and that in turn keeps Sam squirming — it’s overstimulating in the same just-shy-of-painful manner as having his cock sucked too long after an orgasm and he swears he’ll come undone from that alone if Lucifer keeps this up. As it stands he has to clamp a thumb and forefinger around the base of his erection and struggle for breath before guiding the archangel’s hand down too. Sam holds him there a moment, then trails his fingers up the cold, firm flesh of the Devil’s forearm to slip back into the jeans he still hasn’t shucked off.

That won’t do. They get tugged down from narrow hips; Lucifer takes the hint but doesn’t quite go with it in the direction sam expected. Instead of kicking his way out of them or simply making them disappear, he lets them pool down his thighs and ignores them in favour of bracketing Sam’s body. With his weight balanced mostly on his knees (which are now, by necessity, pressed up between Sam’s thighs) and the forearm he slots up behind one of Winchester’s shoulders, he grinds down in an awkward chest-to-thigh press.

It’s as if he wants more than anything just to have as much of himself in contact with Sam at all times. It makes it a bit difficult to manoeuvre a hand in between them. For once it’s Sam’s turn to give Lucifer an “I’m being patient with you but you’re wrong” look. When he catches that look the blond grumbles, “[ _G trian vls de-ol_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/638576/chapters/)” in petulant protest.

“Uh,” Sam responds intelligently. But Lucifer shakes his head to indicate he isn’t going to bother repeating himself in a human language, so the hunter shushes him with another kiss and a murmured, “Hey, it’s okay, I got you.”

Long fingers wrap around both their lengths at once, stroking them together from crown to root and back, and Sam Winchester might well be the first of his species to hear an archangel make such a wrecked, shivering sound. His body temperature is far too low even there but Sam’s burning up enough for the both of them. The other hand, meanwhile, scrapes blunt nails over Lucifer’s scalp, down his nape, further still to rub prickling circles through the base of each wing. The Devil spends a long moment with his eyes shut and brow furrowed until Sam takes it upon himself to kiss him to distraction again; from there on he stares as imperiously as ever, and some small part of the hunter is well-pleased at having recaptured that hungry gaze.

The swipe of one thumb that brings a little dewdrop of pre down to wet their shafts seems perfectly timed to the swipe of another across Sam’s cheekbone. There’s a reverence in both. Lucifer is still more allowing Sam to kiss him than actually kissing back, but at the very least he nips from time to time, or sucks at the hunter’s lower lip. His own free hand drifts across the taller man’s face as if he can scarcely believe his true vessel is finally here to touch (and moreover, finally submitting to his touch). When next they break apart Sam finds his chin held between Lucifer’s thumb and forefinger. He questions with his eyes. The answer is silent too: fingertips trace the flushed line of his lips, and with a welcoming tongue and little nodding motions he draws two of them into his mouth. That tongue wraps around and slithers across them — Lucifer watches like he doesn’t know whether to be horrified or even more aroused — and all the while Sam pumps their cocks together in an exquisite, silk-on-silk slide.

Long afterward (should he miraculously survive the end of the world or even his own idiot “sleeping with Satan” ideas) he supposes he’ll look back and laugh himself sick at how much the both of them come off as awkward, overeager virgins. They’re allowed, he supposes. This is  _terra incognita_  for them both. Sam’s hips shove upward as he bends his knees to set his feet flat on the mattress, and pulls back from Lucifer’s fingers now they’re well wet.

“Go slow okay?” he whispers. Fuck he is so not ready for this.

It takes some doing to find a position in which Lucifer can reach Sam’s backside while still allowing the latter to stroke them together. In the process he pulls back the wings that’d been pinned beneath Sam’s back, and all six of them fold up and flicker out of sight altogether. Perhaps that’s for the best. Too hard to relax for the gentle, insistent pressure of a blunt fingertip seeking entry when there’s smoke and lightning rippling across his back. His pace with their cocks slows to a more languid thing, leisurely even, and Lucifer takes his time about coaxing the ring of muscle to relax. If all that time imprisoned has given him anything it’s a monumental sense of patience.

There’s an interstice in his awareness. Perhaps he slips out of the dream into a deeper state of sleep for a time; when he comes back, hazy and drunk on sensation, the archangel’s waiting for his nod to sink deeper. It still stings enough to make him wince and squirm and jack them a little faster to make up for it. Here the Devil’s unnatural chill is actually a boon: it soothes the burn, and Sam whispers to urge him on.

Two digits have his low whimpers breaking into full-throated groans. Damn but he has no idea how gay guys manage this. If a pair of fingers feel this massive he’s having second thoughts about letting Lucifer enter him with his dick. They stretch and beckon and curl and finally touch a spot that makes him call out  _loud_ , followed by a breathless rush of “Dothatagain.” Once again the Lightbringer gives him that look: half repulsed, half enthralled, and now maybe more than a little bemused. He murmurs reassurances of his own that seem to make the walls shake and make Sam only halfway wish he understood a damned bit of Enochian.

At some point Sam pushes back experimentally. God it’s intense — has him desperate to fuck into his fist instead of letting Lucifer’s hips do the grinding, has him gritting his teeth when he gives up and rocks back against the cool fingers slipping into him over and over to stroke his prostate. Faster, tighter, the friction between his palm and their straining shafts is delicious, and it drives him back to the ledge where the pressure pooling in his gut is ready to snap.

“I’ve waited so long for you,” Lucifer huffs, hips pumping freely, “and this is what you— this is what you make of me. [ _G adphaht dodseh_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/638576/chapters/), Sam, you have no idea—”

“Shh, I got you, just—” Of course he has no idea. Right now he doesn’t care. They’re hurtling towards a point of no return and this time there won’t be the option of agreeing to just not talk about it anymore come morning. He should care. He should be tearing himself apart with guilt and shame. He doesn’t. He won’t. There’s only this and whatever it is between them — fate, loneliness, mutual seduction, whatever this fucked-up tangle really is — is the strongest he’s felt in his twenty-seven years that there’s somewhere he belongs.

Fuck it. He arches up and comes with a Fallen angel’s name breaking on his lips.

Lucifer’s eyes widen to take in the sight; it has him slack-jawed enough for his lips to part in wonder. Sam did that. He’s brought an  _archangel_  to this. A grin splits Sam’s face from ear to ear. Time to bring him off, too.

“C’mere,” he pants, and slips a hand into blond hair again. As before he pulls Lucifer in til their mouths can crash together again, suppressing a wince as those fingers slide out of him entirely. As before he marvels that Lucifer  _lets_  him. There’s hope now bubbling bright in the effervescence of his afterglow. If the blond’s at all disappointed that what may well be his first orgasm in, what, five billion years of existence (Christ, Sam can’t even imagine) comes from his true vessel jerking him off rather than bursting inside him, he doesn’t have a word to say about it.

Well. He does have two words to say as his body hitches and tenses. They are, in order, “ _Sam_ ” and “ _Yes_.” No other straight boy, he’s certain, will ever have felt more pride at feeling another man’s seed spill hot and thick across his skin than Winchester does at this moment.

He’s floating in warmth, chasing the Devil’s tongue and sucking bruises that won’t last into his neck. For his own part Lucifer doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself other than lie heavily against Sam’s torso and indulge the hunter’s endearing fixation with the various uses of lips and teeth; he even tilts his head into Sam’s hand running through his hair, and returns the gesture with his clean hand (though Sam tries desperately not to think of how Lucifer had first come to him in these dreams; their dynamic is shifting, and he’s willing to move past it).

“That was unexpected,” Lucifer deadpans once he’s rested his head on the broad planes of Sam’s chest.

“That’s something we can agree on,” Sam chuckles. He’s officially lost his fucking mind. Must have. But no, he’s not ready to have a freakout over this just yet. Reluctantly he points out, “I need to sleep, y’know. Like really sleep.”

The archangel makes a noncommittal sound. Fuck that, he’s comfortable. Minutes later, though, he relents, and presses his fingers against Sam’s forehead to ease him down.

    

The next few nights pass without dreams of any kind at all. Not that he can recall. He runs his showers a little cooler than usual to jerk off. Even then, it isn’t quite— he can’t get this one thing out of his mind, aside from the ever-present cloud of _freakdom_  hanging over him that he’s coming to think of, to some small degree, as being away from Lucifer.

The first few tries don’t go so well. It’s uncomfortable and frustrating. Perhaps he’s being impatient. On the third or fourth attempt he manages to work himself open just enough to bury a finger inside himself, and damned if the orgasm he strokes out of himself doesn’t hit him like a freight train and leave him reeling, full of the memory of strange-coloured wings.

Yeah. He’s proper fucked now.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Lucifer’s brothers are both dicks. It’s only natural that they seek comfort in each other. Lucifer’s POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _The hunter growls in frustration, trying to shake Lucifer by the front of his shirt to little effect. The fire in his eyes in ferocious — and not untouched by that desperation, that concern, that threw him for such a loop before. “You’re wrong. You know why? ‘Cause Michael might not have free will, sure, maybe he’s stuck with this shitty Plan where rocks fall, everyone dies.” (Lucifer squints and tilts his head, having missed the reference.) “But Dean does. And so do I. And so do you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Puscifer: [Potions](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3RacVQ_Jq4); Lucifer » VAST: [Dirty Hole](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCb4t_gH0o)
> 
> Hover over the Enochian for translation and pronunciation.

“It’s about time,” his vessel sighs, and it makes his Grace burns against his ill-fitted skin.

“Sam,” he answers in a sussurance. He allows himself to be seized by Nick’s hair, by a shoulder. Sam allows himself to be pushed down, spread out. They revel in the touch of skin and power, all questing hands and inquisitive teeth, and when the hunter rises to his knees to sing the archangel’s praises in the back of his throat Lucifer balks at the debauched ecstasy of a hot mouth around him, leaving Sam alone and hard and wondering what he did wrong.

_A demon finds him in Portland. It interrupts his memories of gentle rain sizzling on his wings an aeon ago, and the charred rictus of its face offends him even more than the meatsuit it wears._

_“Where are they?”_

_“We—we’re working on it, my Lord,” it blusters, full of excuses about hex bags and angels._

_“You don’t know.”_

_“…No, my Lord, but—”_

_He doesn’t bother looking. Just gestures, and it burns out with a flash like paper catching fire. The human it had worn comes to. Stares wide-eyed at the blond man and the coruscating shadow of half a dozen wings around him. Asks, weeping, if he’s an angel._

_“I suppose,” he murmurs, and with another gesture makes her head twist ‘round til her neck snaps, and never bothers looking either at the corpse that falls back down in a heap._

He returns. Sam’s frustration is as palpable as his relief. There’s something else lurking beneath it, and it takes him hours of mulling — long after the dream-hours they’ve spent tangled in each other’s limbs, both of them pulling together and pushing away all at once — that he identifies it as  _concern_. Sam had been worried. The Morning Star isn’t certain how he feels about that, and it unnerves him, because it should simply be another opening for temptation.

_He walks the Earth. The sky cracks open and weeps when his wings reach up in a mocking salute towards Heaven. It rains until it floods._

_The demons do not know where Sam Winchester is._

He returns. Sam asks to see his wings again, and he fights with all he has not to show his trepidation when warm primate hands touch them, because no one has since his brother used a grip on their root to throw him into the darkest, coldest corner of Creation. But his human is gentle and full of awe, and he runs fingers that will and always have belonged to Lucifer along their not-feathers and indistinct edges with the same erotic reverence the angel uses now to touch Sam’s face. He wraps them around his human like a shroud as he stretches out between quaking thighs — knees propped up on his shoulders — and makes him wail out praise for the Fallen one’s forked tongue.

_He wades into the ocean. It freezes to slush around his ankles and boils in his wake. The waves catch fire. That the seas have become so filthy that they’ll burn fills the Lightbringer himself with horror._

_The demons do not know where Dean Winchester is, either. He smites the messenger again._

He returns. Sam tries to coax him into talking and distracts him from doing so at the same time. He calls his Boy King a vexation, and Sam laughs, and it’s beautiful.

“Show me somewhere else you liked,” he asks instead. “From before.”

Lucifer nods. He wants to give and give and give to Sam. The motel room peels away and they wander a tropical beach that glistens in the sunlight, glide through its jungles, climb the highest ridges of the jagged mountains that form the island’s room. It isn’t til they spot a pair of huge, ridiculous downy birds racing across a clearing that Sam realises they’re on Mauritius. 

They fuck against a tree, with Lucifer cringing as he thrusts into the groove between Sam’s cock and thigh and the hunter clinging hard while begging to be handled just a little more rough, screaming the angel’s name when a pair of fingers pumping into ass finishes him off. It’s desperate and dirty and they scratch welts into each other’s skin and somewhere his Father is surely laughing at him all over again.

_Azi Dahaka turns over in his sleep and Lucifer gets blamed for the earthquakes that split natural gas fields open and turn the dunes into a lake of fire. In reality the Morning Star has holed up in Antarctica. Far from the eyes of humanity, an angel finds him, a bright little Principality with stern eyes and fluttering wings. He knows her even after all this time but he can’t hear her Song._

_“Dagiel.” He offers her a beatific smile. “Sorry about the fish.”_

_She assures him their Father’s judgment awaits him at Michael’s hand. He spares a glance at the sword she’s brandishing at him. The first of his siblings he’s seen since before anyone but the Metatron had a concept of history looks upon him with fear and tells him he’s going to die and deserve it. It’s more than he can take._

_“Stand down, sister,” he entreats her quietly. She won’t. Dagiel shakes her head and calls out for Michael. The Morning Star flees, nursing another fresh wound in his Grace. He lands in Detroit, perhaps out of some blind sort of hope, and his Voice shatters every glass object in a five-block radius when he screams for **Sam**._

“The answer is still no.” There’s enough vehemence in that statement to make his shoulders shake. He’s turned to face away, glowering at the wall before stalking another arm’s length or two away.

“Sam?” This isn’t new. Neither is the quiver of annoyed disappointment making his already-aching Grace flutter like the wings of an agitated moth. Neither is the ashen taste of rejection on his tongue. Somewhere between there and here a wall’s come up between them and Lucifer understood why it was there the first time but not why it’s been reinforced where he’s been chipping it away. It’s a struggle to remain seated when he feels the distance between them as keenly as a laceration.

They still haven’t talked about the Apocalypse again. There was no need, Lucifer thought. He knew for a fact that Sam was only stalling for the right time. It would happen, and they would win, and they would be vindicated and they would be together, never lonely again.

“Don’t,” the hunter snaps. “Not tonight alright?”

_Not tonight. Not tonight, of all nights, don’t deny me tonight._

“Why not?” He doesn’t care if it makes him sound petulant.

It takes Sam a while to admit, “I called Dean. I told him about you — about us.” He glances up. “Not everything. I told him I want to come back.”

“And?” Lucifer stands, arms folding over his chest. The hunter’s silence speaks volumes. A stormy look settles on his face. “Big Brother cast you out.”

Sam’s flinch confirms it.

“Because you’re mine? Because that makes you a freak and a monster?”

“Stop it,” Sam hisses.

But the archangel’s pacing towards him in a predatory circle just like he used to before Sam stopped shying away. “He probably wants a head start on finding Michael. He won’t have to look hard. The son of a bitch is looking pretty hard for him already. In fact I think one of Michael’s toadies is busy with him right about…now.”

“ _Shut up!_  Don’t you dare!” His true vessel charges him, crashes into him, grapples at him with complete lack of result. “I know my brother, he’ll never say Yes to Michael. And you’re wrong. He didn’t turn me down ‘cause I’m a freak. We’ve known that for years and he’s never given up on me,  _never_. He wants me to stay away to keep me safe from  _your_  dickwad brothers.”

Lucifer hardens his eyes. “But he will say Yes just the same as you will. It has to be this way. Michael will use his body to fight us and kill us or die trying. Michael won’t give up.”

And Sam gets right up in his face, uses his superior height to loom over a creature as vast and ancient as galaxies, and Lucifer is proud of that hubris because it’s his own. “Neither will Dean. We’ll find another way. We always do. Michael-sword or not just ‘cause your brother gave up on you doesn’t mean mine’s gonna give up on me.” The Lightbringer looks away. Sensing he’s struck a solid blow, Sam presses on: “You ever maybe think Michael thinks you’re a monster ‘cause you’re out to wipe mankind off the face of the Earth?”

“Michael doesn’t care about you.” Lucifer doesn’t raise his voice but every bitten-off word carries as though he’d shouted. “He doesn’t give a damn about mankind. Millions of you will die when we square off and he doesn’t care. All he cares about is the Plan. He is an  _archangel_ , Sam, he won’t deviate from it.”

“You’re an archangel,” Sam points out.

He spreads his hands wide in an ‘oh come on’ gesture. “And I can’t deviate from the Plan any more than he can, Sam. You know, an angel found me today. The last time I saw one of my siblings face to face you monkeys hadn’t even figured out how to plant seeds. She told me I’d receive God’s judgment at Michael’s hand. He wants to  _kill_  me, Sam, my own  _brother_. My whole family wants me dead. I’ve spent ages losing my mind in the Cage waiting for you but I don’t— I don’t want to fight him, Sam. I don’t want to kill my brothers. But if I don’t they’re gonna kill  _me_.

“Your life, Sam, it’s just mine playing out again in miniature. And now you’re at the part where the older brother casts you out and resolves to kill you when next you meet.”

The hunter growls in frustration, trying to shake Lucifer by the front of his shirt to little effect. The fire in his eyes in ferocious — and not untouched by that desperation, that concern, that threw him for such a loop before. “You’re wrong. You know why? ‘Cause Michael might not have free will, sure, maybe he’s stuck with this shitty Plan where rocks fall, everyone dies.” (Lucifer squints and tilts his head, having missed the reference.) “But Dean does. And so do I. And so do you.” 

“Sam,” Lucifer sighs as he reaches up to take hold of his vessel’s wrists. He doesn’t pull those hands away, though, so they remain. That righteous fury, that vehement self-assurance that he’s right, reminds the Morning Star of his younger self — the first act of individuality that ironically chained him to this fate. It makes him feel so old.

“There’s never only just two choices.” His human slots their mouths together. By now he’s learned how to lean into it, how to purse his lips and meet Sam’s tongue when it flicks out to lick them open. “There’s always another way. Trust me. Please. We’ll find it. Our brothers are dicks, okay? But we don’t— they’re not gonna kill us, either of us, and we’re not gonna kill them.”

Even if it was always going to play out that way he never would have wished that fraternal rejection on Sam, he realises. There’s no comfort left for him in the world but this and he’s so very tired of being alone.

“Stay with me,” Sam sighs. “Need you.”

He needs this too.

The shift onto the bed is at once less frantic and far more desperate than it has been the last few times. Sam’s in one of his moods where he’s intent on leading, and Lucifer’s distraught enough to follow rather than fight him for control. He hasn’t followed anyone else’s lead in time immemorial. The realisation stills him, and he stares down at the man stretched out beneath him long enough to prompt Sam to question. He answers by biting and sucking a bruise into his human’s collarbone. 

Sam growls, flips them over so the archangel’s the one on his back, and tugs clothes off til he can mouth his way down the shorter man’s torso unimpeded. He captures blue eyes with his own as he seals his lips around the still-soft flesh between Lucifer’s legs and sucks — sucks and licks and props the shaft up with a hand til it’s hard enough to stand on its own. Cold fingers sink into his hair and it has him all but purring, sucking til his cheeks go hollow only to pull off, lathe his tongue around the crown, and dive down again. Some nights the Lightbringer can’t watch. This is not one of those nights. Sam doesn’t keep this up long, though, before he’s drawing down the hand from his hair to suck a few fingers wet. This is how he wants it, then.

“I need….” He pulls back, panting, and Lucifer couldn’t contemplate looking anywhere else. “More. Please.”

Lucifer’s breath catches. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sam nods, nuzzling and licking the sac resting near his chin. “I just. Need to not think, tonight. Help me forget.”

Something clenches in his chest. To forget for a night, even for a few hours, would be very fine indeed. He’s re-lived too much for one day already.

A hidden wing stretching out to trail up Sam’s thighs earns a broken little groan — and faster than thinking he’s sitting upright with the long-muscled Winchester limbs wrapped around his waist. The human kisses him deliriously, hips rolling even before the first finger makes its way inside. He’s scratching at the archangel’s shoulder blades as if he could dig out his wings and stretch them open. The thick weight of Sam’s cock presses against his belly. For all the man’s initial wariness of this he’s sure as Hell come to enjoy these prostate massages a great deal. But it’s more than that tonight, so he’s shivering with nervous energy all over again, and it makes all the difference in how quickly his ass can get worked open.

“Relax,” Lucifer whispers into a well-nibbled ear, “you know I’d never hurt you. Not unless you ask me to.”

Sam bites his lip, pushes at an arm. “Lay me back down. Man what I wouldn’t give for some—” And because it’s a lucid dream (meaning, by damn, reality is what they decide it to be) there’s a jar of Vaseline in arm’s reach. He seizes it with a triumphant sound, smirking at Lucifer’s frown of non-comprehension, and waits til he’s sprawled on his back again with the Lightbringer kneeling between his thighs to show him what to do with that. 

“Easy. Easy.” Winchester’s trying to soothe the angel’s nerves but his own breath only comes steady through effort. They take it slow and even then by the time the crown alone has breached him he’s grinding his head back into the mattress and cursing about being split in half. Lucifer’s eyes are wide and wild watching himself sink inch after inch into this beautiful body formed in his image. Some quiet part of him marvels at the narcissism involved here. The rest of him is marvelling at Sam. 

To say this isn’t how he’d imagined it going when his true vessel finally accepted him inside his body would be a cosmic understatement. Still there’s no denying the way his Grace sings as they join, or the open joy in his human’s face. —That is, when he isn’t screwing his eyes shut and making choked-off displeasured noises. “Sam?” he pants. “Should I stop?”

“No, don’t stop— okay okay maybe just, just a minute, hold up.” He’s red-faced and panting, staring up at the ceiling with a glazed expression…and he’s only taken it halfway. By now his own erection’s waned enough to rest half-mast against his belly. “This is. Wow. Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” Lucifer agrees.

“Actually um. Kinda stings.” Sam squirms, trying to ease the discomfort by adjusting his hips, and finally taps at his own forehead while levelling puppy eyes up at Lucifer. “D’you think you could…?”

The archangel smirks. Of course he could. He bends down to brush his lips across Sam’s brow to ease the discomfort and the pain. Their hands trace each other’s faces, and when he’s told “So much better…move now, you can move” he curls his back to sink the rest of the way inside. And there it is, in the seamless flush of angel to human, in the blazing-hot clutch of this flawed mess of dust and clay trapping his purity: something sweet and his alone; something like completion and Song filling the ragged, gaping hollows inside him; something like the salvation he’s been so long denied. It tears the Voice from him in a near-sob that makes the walls shake and lights explode — Sam’s answering groan is a vibration against his throat, a blessing on his skin.

He could die here. He’s finally alive here.

“Never doubt,” he whispers, rocking them together; “never doubt that you’re mine.”

Blunt fingernails dig into the meat of his ass as Sam pushes back against every thrust. He bares his teeth in a smirk, biting Lucifer’s lower lip, and growls back, “Don’t ever doubt you’re mine too.”

At first he’s so very careful. They move against each other — slow, deep — learning each other inside-out all over again, finding how perfectly they fit; and between Lucifer’s cold fury and Sam’s passionate heat one of them hisses that they should go harder and by God they do. The archangel fucks into him hard and fast enough that he has to brace both hands atop Sam’s shoulders to keep him from sliding up the bed. The hunter smirks and shoves him back, only to roll over onto his hands and knees where he can rock back wildly, whispering out his dirty thrill of doing exactly what so many women have done for him. Fully confident now, he reaches down between his own legs to jack himself in time to Lucifer’s half-stroke pounding — until the angel bats that hand away and pulls Sam upright by his neck, walks him all the way up the bed on their knees, and takes him against the wall with mouths sealed against each other.

Sam begs and praises and snarls. Lucifer rumbles Enochian promises, demands everything, gives everything. Between two tainted exiles they find perfection.

Once more they change: Sam swings his legs around and bears down with his full weight to push the Morning Star back onto his ass. He straddles the blond man’s waist, riding him, each wrapping his arms around the other’s back. The hunter wastes no time in seeking out his partner’s mouth nor in tonguefucking the same, stealing away a breath and a groan. “Wings,” he begs, “please, please let me, they feel so good, everything feels so good, Lucifer please.”

And Lucifer wants to give and give and give.

He shoves in deep, pulls Sam’s hips down with brutal pressure, and lets one pair of liquid lightning after another unfurl from his back. Even before he acquiesced he knew his true vessel would be sifting his fingers through feathers to marvel at the gap sparks leaping to meet him, stroking the plasma-hot bases of them now he knows they won’t really burn — though if he realises by now what it does to Lucifer, how it soothes and unnerves him all at once, the hunter keeps it secondary to the pleasure it brings himself, and Lucifer will let him. Anything to stay here, safe, whole, with the light of a kismet soul holding his loneliness at bay.

But he wants to reward Sam, too, so he slips a hand between them and mimics the way he’s felt his true vessel’s hands skitter up and down his shaft. He isn’t familiar enough with this yet to have reliable aim — not this way — but he knows the firm knot of a p-spot when the top of his glans slides against it, and he does his best to press against it each time he shoves his cock up into that tight passage.

“[ _Niiso pambt_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/638576/chapters/),” he whispers. Lucifer smirks and sucks another mark into Sam’s neck. Soon enough the body atop and around him stiffens, and splashes white heat onto their bellies, whimpering the archangel’s name — and isn’t that music to his ears. And how he tightens, how he clenches—! Not only with the fingers swiping through his wings to claw at his back, nor just with the knees crushed against his sides or heels digging into the small of his back, nor just the teeth that snap and scrape whatever they’re allowed, no, but that very muscle-ring he’d taken so long to ease open and the Vaseline-slicked tunnel beyond. It might be hyperbole to liken it to flying too close to the heart of a dying star but right now it seems pretty fucking apt.

The pressure that’s been building in him slow and steady (so like the way they reach out when they’re near) seems to strangle him, and snaps, taking all rationality with it. Lucifer lets out another wall-shaking groan and spills himself deep inside Sam’s body. The man keeps him kissed dizzy as they come back down. They’re all hands kneading into exhausted muscle, lying sprawled across each other on a bed that doesn’t technically exist; for once, if only just for now, their minds are free of the threats of fratricide and ruined worlds. Sam noses along the Morning Star’s stubbled jaw to whisper his thanks, and Lucifer hears in it the adoration he’s craved from his vessel since he came into being.

Angels were never meant for this, he muses; but he’s made a career out of doing things angels were never meant to do.

In the morning he sends out orders to redouble efforts in finding the vessels. Lucifer is more certain than ever now that he has to get to them before Michael does. His own motives, on the other hand, are less clear than they were the week before.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sam and Lucifer both weigh their options and assess their priorities, they meet in the middle, just as they always would – even if it's in a way no one expected. Sam's POV.
> 
> Excerpt:  
>  _He wants to give and give and give to Lucifer. He wants to give him everything but what he’s asked for, because there has to be another answer besides “yes” or “no”._
> 
> _So he grapples and clings, rakes his teeth over the Devil’s skin, and welcomes him inside again but on his own terms. He sees the way the archangel flinches at the touch to his back where his wings lie hidden still, feels the shiver of some terrible memory. It makes Sam kiss him all the more fiercely to remind him that he’s here and now and with Sam, and if it’s within his power — in any way possible with his gift of free will—_
> 
> _“I won’t let you fall again.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended Listening:** Sam » Depeche Mode: [Strangelove](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIrm0dHbCDU); Lucifer » Burial: [Archangel](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlEkvbRmfrA)

“Come here.” He draws himself up to sit on the bed. It’s always a little different, this room, always familiar, always in bad need of having the thermostat cranked up about twenty damn degrees. He knows what’s waiting for him here and he’s afraid, yes, but the rituals between them soothe his nerves. As long as the first thing Devil perched at the foot of the bed says is

“Sam?”

the spell they have over each other will hold, and he’ll know what to do.

The open expression Lucifer wears takes on a note of surprise but he does as Sam asks, moving up to sit in front of him and just to one side. Like everything the archangel does Sam knows this is deliberate. He sits calm and proud and regal. This, he realises, is not Dante’s impotent thrashing beast (though he sure as Hell feels like he’s spent millennia trapped in ice), nor the Christian image of a petty wretch cavorting about being evil for evil’s sake (no, that’s demons, and for all their power they’re nothing but deformed human souls). If anyone’s gotten it right it was Milton and even he couldn’t do this being justice.

As much as Sam allows he’s not the best judge of character (the fact that Satan’s here in the first place much less craning into Sam’s hand resting on his jaw is testament to that) there’s too much there to deny. He’s stood firm in the face of fear and come out the other side to find a contentment he can’t put into words, a perfect safety; in Lucifer he’s offered a level of trust no one’s ever given him once they know enough about him. Not even Dean, though admitting that feels like tearing a hole in his own heart: Sam broke that trust with one bad decision after the next, and while time may mend the rift between them…as Lucifer told him, wounds leave a mark even after they’re healed.

Maybe in time he’ll make some decision that ruins Lucifer’s trust in him, too, but for now, his acceptance feels like the home he’s been trying to find all his life.

It isn’t what he’d expected. It’s nothing like what he’d thought he’d wanted. Even if they both make out of this without dying bloody (and he’s none too sure that’s possible but Sam holds out hope here no one else can) he knows the two of them are never going to be anything close to “normal”. The being whose lips he’s licking open, whose mouth he’s exploring with soft slides of tongue against tongue, might look like a man but it’s only skin-deep and Sam knows, oh he knows he can never make the mistake of treating Lucifer like one. There’ll never be a two-storey in the suburbs and two-point-five kids and a dog in the yard. One does not domesticate an archangel. Especially not one as bitter and broken as Lucifer.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Sam’s seen how his mind works, seen the unspeakable longing, the betrayal and mourning, and how all those years trapped in a cold, dark, silent nothing froze it all into rage. It’s such a contrast to his first encounters with angels -– Castiel and Uriel, droning out their intention to annihilate an entire town and agreeing with Dean’s accusation of their heartlessness without missing a beat — that it’s sometimes hard to remember they’re the same species. Then he remembers Anna, and supposes that maybe the farther an angel Falls the more strongly he feels. By now he’s certain it’s the intensity of Lucifer’s emotions that made him the way he is.

Wanting to offer Satan surcease might just be the dumbest thing any human being has ever done but here he is, because damn it (damn him) he’s certain he’s right: had Michael been half the brother Dean is it never would have come to this. If no one else will pray for the sinner that needs it most then he will. If no one else will reach out to the one who’s fallen farthest then he will. 

He just hopes, with everything he is, that it isn’t too late.

Just the day before they’d been the same: a younger brother, desperate for a beloved older brother’s approval, cut off and cast down and left to despair. That pain is a ghost hanging between them he wants desperately to exorcise. He thinks of Michael, all righteous devotion to the orders of a Father that wasn’t there to see them through, allowing Lucifer to languish in darkness until the time came to drag him back out and kill him. He thinks of Dean, who was only ever willing to follow the first half of his orders to either save Sam or kill him.

Save him.

_Save him._

He wants to give and give and give to Lucifer. He wants to give him everything but what he’s asked for, because there has to be another answer besides “yes” or “no”.

So he grapples and clings, rakes his teeth over the Devil’s skin, and welcomes him inside again but on his own terms. He sees the way the archangel flinches at the touch to his back where his wings lie hidden still, feels the shiver of some terrible memory. It makes Sam kiss him all the more fiercely to remind him that he’s  _here_ and  _now_  and with Sam, and if it’s within his power — in any way possible with his gift of free will—

“I won’t let you fall again.”

The Grace enshrouding him, whispering against his soul, flares with gratitude so deep it hurts. Lucifer arches above him, bracing himself up on hands planted astride Sam’s chest as his hips continue to roll. There’s something brittle in the glacial eyes that gaze down at him. Tentative, like he’s trying to remember how to hope.

“I want to believe you,” the Morning Star murmurs back. He slides a hand down in a goosebump-raising tract all the way from Sam’s ribs to the back of a thigh and lifts it up, hooking the knee over his shoulder. The hunter sucks in an astonished breath for the stretch, the feel of being held open as Lucifer slides into him with languid thrusts. They haven’t gotten rough yet. Sam’s still adjusting to the burn and weight inside him; Lucifer’s still adjusting to the heat and physicality. For now their sex is like blues, sharp and aching-deep and soulful. 

He bites his lip but doesn’t bother censoring his groan. The archangel loves the praise even if it seems to disconcert him at the same time. Panting, he asks, “Do you trust me?”

“Of course,” Lucifer breathes almost before the question’s completed, “you’re half of me, Sam. I know you like I know myself.” He actually stalls there for a moment and casts a considering grimace up at the ceiling. “Actually some might say that’s a strike against you.”

Sam chokes and shoves at the archangel with the knee resting on his shoulder. “Gee thanks— don’t make me laugh when you’re fucking me!”

“Felt good though,” he growls back, and pushes that leg over so he can lie down flush against his human from behind.

It feels like they spend days there, grinding and shoving and undulating with each other, though only seconds tick by in reality. Time’s funny in dreams, after all. By the time Sam comes (for the Devil is a gentleman and sees to his true vessel’s needs) they’ve half rolled over and sped up, clawed at each other’s bodies and the bed, bitten angry red marks into each other’s skin and kissed til their lips are swollen and their mouths have gone dry. Hazel eyes gone wide as a cat’s in the dark stay fixed on Lucifer’s face: he’s every bit as hungry to watch the procession of pleasure bordering on pain at work in the angel’s face, in his ancient eyes, as Lucifer has been for every part of Sam. He watches this entity of unspeakable power and fathomless pain lose himself in ecstasy — feels the hot gush of liquid inside him that sometimes seems the only part of him that has any warmth left — and he is beautiful. 

Sam tells him so.

“I was the most beautiful,” Lucifer whispers between the kisses that pepper Sam’s shoulders and neck. “I was the Morning Star. He named me Lightbringer because of how brightly I shone.”

There’s something in his voice — so hollow, so lost — that makes Sam turn and wrap his arms around the cold body pressed against him, hold him tight, as if a mere human tainted by demon blood could ever ease away what he hears between the archangel’s words. Had Lucifer been a man Sam would have expected to find him sobbing. Instead there’s only steady breath and a face burrowing into the hollow of his neck.

A quiet interstice later he coaxes Lucifer back up with soft, searching kisses and steels himself. “I want to give you something,” Sam tells him, “but you have to trust me, and I need to know I can trust you. This is for you but it’s gotta be on my terms.”

There’s that angelic head-tilt again, coloured as only Lucifer’s tends to be by a furrowed brow and wrinkling nose. It smooths out, though, and he nods. “No tricks. No lies. You have my word, Sam, for all you choose to believe that’s worth.”

Sam swallows. That’ll have to be good enough. “The same goes for Dean,” he amends. Lucifer cranks an eyebrow up, but acquiesces.

“If he shoots me I will backhand him,” he murmurs.

“I can’t promise he won’t,” Sam sighs.

.

Sam Winchester is no fool. Well okay maybe he’s something of a fool but he’s not ignorant. He’s been watching the news. He knows about the earthquakes, the fires, the sudden climate shifts and inexplicable riots and he knows exactly what it’s all about. He paces back and forth in the motel room he’s been staying in these last two weeks til he thinks he’ll wear a groove in the carpet. All his possessions have been packed away. Last night’s conversations replay in his head over and over again: one on the phone and one in a dream.

It’s now or never. He can do this. It’s only the end of the world. 

Sucking in a shaking breath, he closes his eyes and prays.

He tells Lucifer where he is.

The change is instant. The temperature drops so suddenly his hunter instincts scream for salt and iron. The sky darkens; a single crack of thunder shakes the windows and all at once it’s pouring rain like someone ripped a hole in the sky. Inside the lights flicker, spark, and burst. Sam pivots on the ball of one foot to dodge glass shards and there he is: the Devil in the flesh. Sam’s heart tries to escape out his throat as the archangel strides across the room, stopping just short of touching — allowing Sam to make the first move.

Something’s off. He frowns — raises a hand to trace what looks like a burn at Lucifer’s temple. There’s another at his neck, another lancing across his cheek. “Lucifer,” he murmurs. “You been fighting?”

“Sam.” It’s an indulgence, a ritual comfort. “As little as possible. I told you, Nick is only…Plan B. He can’t hold me forever. Not a whole lot longer, actually.”

A chill slides down Sam’s spine. That could just be Lucifer, though. The cold is far more real here in the waking world. “Is he even still in there?”

The archangel shakes his head. “Nick has left the building. It’s unfortunate but probably merciful that he burned out so much faster than his body.” He pauses, raises a tentative hand to Sam’s cheek, and beams in relief when the hunter leans into his touch. “You won’t suffer the same fate. I swear to you. You’ll be safe and whole forever with me.”

“You are as stubborn as I am despite being wrong,” Sam smirks, and kisses away the flat look he gets for quoting Lucifer’s own words back at him. “Listen. There’s a lot I have to ask of you, but you’ve just gotta trust me, okay? Just trust me.”

“You didn’t call me here to say Yes.” It’s a statement rather than a question. “And you didn’t call me here to try to trap or kill me.”

“Just trust me,” Sam insists, and Lucifer nods. The hunter rests their foreheads together to steel himself again. The familiar comfort he’s come to crave in his dreams seeps into his blood and settles in his bones. He’s been running with this ‘something really stupid’ for a while and he’s not about to stop now, but knowing he’s essentially alone in that body seals the deal. ”Before we…before anything else, I want— I need to feel you. For real this time.”

Lucifer gives him a patient look. “Everything in those dreams we’ve shared has been real.” But Sam just shakes his head, abandoning the idea that an angel would understand how limit the human perception of reality can be, and tugs him onto the bed that’s so similar to so many others they’ve shared.

The lot of it is steeped in familiarity. The taste of his mouth. The way he touches Sam as if he’s priceless. The burn of stubble that should be jarring for all its difference from a woman’s skin. The clothing that smells like winter rain, and the process of shucking it off. The name and rightness singing in his veins:  _Lucifer, Lucifer_ , all  _Lucifer_  who waited so long in the darkness for him.

Sam runs his hands across strong limbs, the faint softness of his belly, wincing at the places where the archangel’s barely-contained Grace has started to scorch through. He hadn’t counted on this. He can’t let it change things. Not now. It just means they have to work faster. He guides Lucifer down, catches an imperious grip on each wrist, pins his hands up against the headboard with a whispered, “ _Stay_.”

Lucifer watches him but does indeed keep his hands there as if tethered. It’s remarkable how he can convey so much calm and trust and questioning all at once into a simple look and “Sam?” in his ever-patient voice.

“On my terms,” the hunter reminds him. He nudges thighs apart til he can lie down between them. Faintly, it occurs to him that there’s a big difference between dreaming this and actually  _doing_  it — that he’s standing at a threshold whence there’s no coming back. By now he’s made peace with the idea of handling someone else’s dick (he has to be completely honest: jerking off in the shower is one thing, but when a guy finds himself fingering his own ass to daydreams of getting fucked into the mattress, it’s time to re-evaluate how he labels himself). He’s already got  _Lucifer_  of all people and things in the universe spread out naked in his bed. Seems like the decision’s already been made. He licks his lips to wet them.

Down the hatch.

All told it isn’t  _that_  different from going down on a woman in principle, he tells himself, in terms of the taste and softness of the flesh. Sticking mostly to what he knows he likes having done to him works pretty damned well. He leads with broad strokes of his tongue, narrowing down to lash the tip across the underside of the shaft, across the frenulum, around the head before sealing his lips there to suck. A little at a time he works his way down — minding his teeth — though he only makes it halfway before he has to draw back again. Lick, stroke, repeat. A hand wrapped around the base covers what he can’t reach with his mouth when he sucks, and soon he has Lucifer writhing and groaning his name. Sam swallows hard at the first drops of clear fluid that come seeping out, keeps swallowing, and soon he feels the telltale jerks and clenches that signal he’s close—

At which point he lets go and sits back on his knees, grinning at the archangel’s frustrated cry. Were he anyone else the look he gets pinned with would surely be accompanied by an almighty smiting. 

“Trust me,” he sighs, and kisses his way down Lucifer’s legs (avoiding more burns as he finds them) til he stops seething. That happens around the time he reaches the first ankle slated for rubbing. Even if he doesn’t understand the purpose behind it he affects the manner of a cat in the sun, soaking up the attention lavished on him.

Once he’s certain the Lightbringer is well and truly relaxed he licks and nibbles his way back up the other leg, whispering low enough along the way that even the angel has to cock his head to catch the words. At first they make him balk — make his expression close off defensively — but as Sam goes on he seems to realise he isn’t being mocked, and that look becomes fragile all over again.

“Oh brightest angel, appointed by fate to be my guardian, I give you thanks for all the benefits you have bestowed on me in body and in soul.”

He keeps his head lowered, lips scarcely leaving Lucifer’s skin. 

“I honour and glorify you, because you consented to assist me with such patient loyalty, and to defend me against all the assaults of my enemies. Blessed be the hour that you were assigned to me as my guardian, my defender, and my patron.”

Sam graces the archangel’s groin with a kiss as well, but keeps going, wending his way up towards his mouth. He rises on hands and knees to hover above him. It’s a position of playful, predatory dominance that comes easy to him and lends a sharpness to the blasphemy.

“In acknowledgment and return for all your loving guidance, may you receive the sacred and gentle heart of….” The grin he cracks only slightly diminishes the reverence in his demeanour here. “Me.”

“You’re missing a line,” Lucifer breathes. His pupils have grown wide, and he’s still as the grave, transfixed by his true vessel and the implications of his words. His _prayer_. If there’s nothing truly holy left in him it still makes his Grace swell like a rain cloud and dances through it like lightning.

The hunter makes a tiny noise of amusement and smirks into one more kiss — this one, at last, on the mouth, all tongue and teeth and ownership. “One thing at a time. Lucifer. I want to come into your body.” He dips his head, bites a collarbone. “Give me your consent. Say yes to me.”

If this all goes pear-shaped and he dies bloody or the world does at least Sam Winchester will be able to say he rendered an archangel speechless with an offer of role reversal, and got him to  _agree_. He just dares anyone else to make the same claim.

Because Lucifer does let his head loll back with a  _thud_  against the headboard he’s still holding with both hands, and takes a bewildered moment to meet Sam’s eyes and declare, “Yes.”

Winchester nods and spends another long moment worrying at Lucifer’s lips and jawline with his teeth. His teeth ghost over ribs and chest, across nipples and hips, and finally reach down to spread the blond’s legs wide. 

“Stay,” he reiterates as he slides off the bed. A moment later he returns with a jar Lucifer recognises from Sam’s dreams. He slicks his own shaft down (stiff as a board from sucking dick, yep, he has officially relinquished his Kinsey 1) and dips a hand down to smear thick gel across the shorter man’s entrance — wipes the excess on the sheets, and takes him by the backs of his knees.

“Let me in,” he rumbles.

Lucifer draws in a breath. “Show me you mean it, Sam.”

It isn’t gentle. The first push has the archangel frowning, but he’s master of the body he inhabits, and wills it to relax enough for Sam to slide in all at once. If the hunter cries out at the sudden heat and crushing tightness,  _oh God he’s as hot inside as his skin is cold_ , it’s nothing to the shout it wrenches out of his partner. Sam’s voice, after all, can’t blow out windows and set off car alarms a block in every direction, but Lucifer’s can and most certainly does. When Sam startles badly at the rush of rain and howling wind that comes in, Lucifer snaps an irritated gesture towards it, and the window is whole.

“Holy shit,” Sam gasps. The Devil snorts amused agreement, but insists he move with arching hips. And he does, God he does — he’s been called a tiger in bed, a monster, even when he’s held back, but with Lucifer he knows he can be himself. Lucifer lets him trust someone else to be gentle or match his fury. Lucifer lets him take and take, lets him bite and bruise, lets him slam home and growl out how perfectly they fit this way, too. There’s a terrible, terrible irony in the fact that this might be the most pure he’s ever felt.

He wants to give and give and give to Lucifer.

“Touch yourself. Tell me when you’re getting close.” Lucifer nods and snakes a hand down to wrap around his own shaft, stroking squeezing. He’s apparently in no rush to judge by his pace, either, and that near-laziness contrasted to the way he’s bucking his hips up to meet every last one of Sam’s brutal thrusts has the hunter’s pulse pounding in his ears. He wants to see him come undone again. Wants to see him unraveled, unmade, put back together again. He catches himself too close and pulls back to slather more Vaseline onto himself while counting backwards from twenty. This happens twice before Lucifer finally starts  _moving_  rather than simply taking in the sensations with mute astonishment. The moment he signals that he’s close, Sam stops again, and pushes his hand away.

There’s that stormy look again (and another shower of sparks from the busted light fixtures for good measure), so he reminds him, “Trust me,” and “Roll over, up on hands and knees.”

Giving Lucifer time to comply also affords Sam the chance to have a small internal fit of  _Holy fucking shit I’m giving orders to an archangel I’m doing this to Lucifer and he lets me oh God_  and honestly he thinks that little freak-out is justified. By the time the angel’s in position Sam has his game face on again; he nudges Lucifer’s knees further apart, guides his hips down, and groans loud and low at the exquisite spasming heat gripping his cock. One hand on a hip, the other on a shoulder, and his whole back rocks and sways with the force of snapping his pelvis up over and over, reluctant for every backstroke that drags his shaft free of the archangel’s ass even partway. And the Devil himself is a wanton thing: knuckles white on the headboard, torso in constant motion like he’s dancing, throat bared in a nonstop groan that’s more often than not Sam’s name.

Again he finds himself far too close to the edge. This time it’s harder to back down from it (though eventually he conjures the mental image of Zachariah in a thong and that almost goes too far). This is too good, too damned good for words, too good to be real but here he is balls-deep in the ass of the Morning Star about to find out if he’s too proud to beg for this. His thrusts slow down to a bone-jarring grind as he leans down against Lucifer’s back, pressing heated kisses and promises there. A hand wraps around to grasp and stroke the cock he left hard and weeping; Lucifer jerks eagerly into the grip and growls, “Do it this time, Sam, don’t tease.”

“Just trust me,” he breaths against a shoulder. “Gimme your wings, and trust me.”

For all he insists that what happens when he’s dreamwalking is real the angel’s movements slow — it reaffirms exactly what’s being asked of him. And still he complies. “Back up a moment,” he warns.

(He wants to give and give and give to Sam.)

It’s just like it was in his dreams. A glow emanates from the blond’s core, spreads across his back, and erupts in six forks of lightning that scorch through the walls before unfurling into the likeness of vast, feathered wings, long and elegant like a vulture’s. All the breath leaves Sam’s lungs at once. It takes a well-coordinated squeeze of the muscles clinging to his dick to get him started again on grinding their hips together and stroking Lucifer off. But now, ahh,  he’s arching harder, faster, into that welcoming passage, and sliding a hand through the strangely thick air where one wing or another beats in a three-stroke rhythm he tries to match with his hips; and he can feel the ass he’s ravaging clutch and the cock in his hand strain, hears hitching breath, and the bastard

_slows_

_down_

_again._

“ _Sam!!_ ” Lucifer rages. He squeezes down on the hunter’s shaft again, bucks into his hand, and smacks his arms with a pair of wings for good measure.

“I’ve got you,” he pants, “it’s okay, I’ve got you—”

He’s close again, full of pressure and electric current racing through him from those magnificent, impossible wings, and he gives Lucifer his all to bring him back to the edge with him— and he whispers, “I’ve got you, I trust you,” and licks the searing juncture of the archangel’s back and wings.

They come undone.

His world is blinding light, and electricity burning his veins, and Grace cradling his soul, and all he hears is a hurricane calling his name. He’s heard orgasm called  _la petite mort_  before. Not until now has it actually felt like dying.

Only dying has none of the quiet romance of poetry and songs; he’d know. It’s messy and undignified and confusing and cold, and all of that aptly described how he feels when he comes back down still half-hard inside the Lightbringer and blinking against black spots in his vision. There might be blood coming out his ears. He’ll check when his nerves are firing correctly again. For now, he’s being lowered down to the bed and easing out of Lucifer’s body (amid a small spill of liquid the angel doesn’t look pleased about; to that end, he flicks a strand of Grace and they’re clean again the both of them). “You,” he pants, unable at first to say much of anything else.

“Are brilliant and amazing?” Lucifer offers with a smirk, as if he didn’t look completely dazed by Sam’s performance, himself.

Sam barely manages the ghost of a laugh. “I meant it,” he sighs, tangling his limbs in with Lucifer’s. “All of it.”

Blue eyes and hazel meet. Lips follow suit. “Rest,” Lucifer murmurs into the thick nest of his hunter’s hair. “Tell me your plans afterward.”

And he trusts Lucifer, so he does.

.

It’s still raining when he wakes up an hour later though it’s slowed from “flash flood” conditions at least. Sam showers, dresses, and stands at the window trying to see if his interim car even survived their literally-earth-shaking romp. He finds the Morning Star perched on the edge of the bed reading the Gideon Bible that was stuffed into the nightstand and Sam does his level best not to laugh at that. After several minutes of trying to decide how to broach a topic that could either be his salvation or his doom, he gives up and jumps right in.

“Dean called last night. Well. Early this morning. Before I got to bed.”

Lucifer watches Sam and waits for him to continue.

“Something, uh. Changed his mind. I’unno what happened, he wasn’t real clear on that—”

“Zachariah happened,” Lucifer supplies. At Sam’s horrified look he adds, “I did tell you that. Obviously he made it out again.” He gestures for the hunter to continue.

“…Right. You’re right. He must’ve — I can find out later. Point is, he did change his mind. He’s back in, I’m back in. He’s taking me back. I’m supposed to meet him halfway soon as I can.”

The blond’s expression is carefully blank. His arms cross over his chest. “And you’re sure this isn’t a trap because?”

Sam knows his grin is a stupid one, and he knows he’s got that look on his face others call puppy eyes, and he’ll swear to his dying breath he isn’t doing it on purpose. 

“‘Cause he’s my big brother,” he shrugs. “And I know him. I trust him.” He meets the old, old eyes of an archangel as steadily as he can, even though he can feel all the vastness and alien intelligence underneath the blue gaze of an unassuming human man, and nods out the window. “Your brother can’t stop this. Maybe you don’t believe you can, either. But I do, because….” He shrugs again. “Just ‘cause.”

For a long moment Lucifer just stares at him. Finally, though, he looks away, huffs a sigh, and lets his hands fall to grip the bed’s edge. “When that doesn’t work, you and I both know you’ll say Yes to me, and this will continue exactly as my Father planned it.”

He doesn’t sound happy about it. But Sam, though. Sam turns and smiles at him, the sinner no one prayed for, the little brother who was never taken back. “When we find another way and kick that crappy Plan to the curb, I won’t let you fall again.” He holds out a hand. “There’s always more than two choices. We’ll find a way to stop this, and we won’t be alone.”

Lucifer, the Adversary, Prince of Hell, looks at Sam like he’s peeling apart the human’s soul to see inside him; and Sam stands his ground.

“Tell me where we’re going, then.”

He takes Sam’s hand.


End file.
